The need to collect information on agricultural production has been with us since the dawn of civilization. Agriculture was the main economic activity, supplying both food for growing populations and the basis for taxation. The Sumerians of Mesopotamia before 3000 BC developed writing systems in order to record crop yields and livestock numbers. The Ancient Egyptians recorded the extent and productivity of arable land on the banks of the Nile. Later conquerors surveyed their new possessions, as in the Norman conquest of England which resulted in the Domesday Book of 1086, recording the agricultural potential of each district in great detail.
The pioneers of scientific agriculture, such as J.B. Lawes and J.H.Gilbert at Rothamsted, England, from 1843 onwards, insisted on accurate measurement and recording as the first requirement for a better understanding of the processes of agricultural production. The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) was founded in 1834 with its symbol of a sheaf of...
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References and Further Reading
Cochran WG, Cox GM (1957) Experimental designs, 2nd edn. Wiley, New York
Finney DJ (1962) An introduction to statistical science in agriculture. Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd
Fisher RA (1924) The influence of rainfall on the yield of wheat at Rothamsted. Phil Trans Roy Soc London B 213:89–142
Mead R, Curnow RM (1983) Statistical methods in agriculture and experimental biology, 2nd edn. Chapman and Hall, London
Patterson HD, Thompson R (1971) Recovery of interblock information when block sizes are unequal. Biometrika 58(3): 545–554
Webster R, Oliver MA (2007) Geostatistics for environmental scientists, 2nd edn. Wiley, New York
Yates F (1981) Sampling methods for censuses and surveys, 4th edn. Griffin, London
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Ross, G.J.S. (2011). Agriculture, Statistics in. In: Lovric, M. (eds) International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04898-2_88
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