Statistical Research Issues in Crop and Cropping System Experiments for Enhancing Food Security Support

Abstract

Food security is essen?al to maintain the human popula?on and the environment. The strategies for food security must take into considera?on the human popula?on dynamics and dynamics of natural resources, plant and animal popula?ons on which human survival depends. It is essen?al to look into effec?ve op?ons for search and conserva?on of crop and animal germplasm, along with necessary gene?c modifica?ons to develop new seeds and suitable embedding of the new seeds in cropping systems for high and sustainable produc?vity. At almost every significant stage of technological development, sta?s?cal designs to gather valid and efficient evidence (data) and methods of assessment of the evidence are needed to form decisions on the technologies. This presenta?on is restricted to the crop and cropping system aspects of experiments. The sta?s?cal issues related to the following would be discussed: 1) search and maintenance of diverse crop germplasm, 2) evalua?on of crop germplasm, 3) cropping systems related to conserva?on agriculture and crop rota?ons, and 4) need of crop actuary. In the context of germplasm conserva?on two aspects of maintaining the germplasm, mini‐core selec?on and focused iden?fica?on of germplasm strategy (FIGS) will be discussed. The issues related to field experimenta?on for evalua?ng moderate to large number of genotypes and methods of sta?s?cal data analysis with a view to exploit genotype – environment interac?on will presented. The challenges of design and analysis of cropping systems and evalua?ng the data in terms of produc?vity and sustainability indicators will be discussed. The role of a crop actuary to mi?gate riskiness due to the effect of weather uncertainty on crop produc?on and produc?vity will also be discussed in brief.