Experimental Designs for the Selection of Integrated Farming System Components

Integrated farming system (IFS) approach is a powerful tool for ensuring the livelihood security of small and mar­ginal farmers. The precision of IFS experiments can be enhanced using statistical and computational tools. Two-part designs are helpful in selecting the best possible components in IFS. They involve two groups of treatment arranged in incomplete blocks with respect to both groups, and the concurrence of treatment pairs within and between groups is constant. The fusion of two incomplete block designs in a systematic manner can yield two-part designs. Further, for situations where certain experimental units are not available, two-part structurally incomplete designs are proposed.