Life / Agriculture & Food

Field trials and randomization

At Rothamsted, R.A. Fisher developed randomized field experiments and analysis of variance (1925) to test fertilizers and crop varieties.

The Rothamsted station, founded by John Lawes in 1843, had run fertilizer trials for decades, but the results were hard to interpret. The statistician R.A. Fisher, working there from 1919, introduced randomization, replication and analysis of variance, set out in Statistical Methods for Research Workers (1925) and The Design of Experiments (1935). His methods made fertilizer and variety testing reliable and later became the basis of clinical trials.