Abstract
The objective of many dairy nutrition experiments is to determine the effect of certain dietary treatments on milk production and quality responses. However, milk responses are quite variable and cows (experimental units) are expensive and have substantial maintenance costs. This manuscript reviews principles for planning to obtain good data relevant to the hypothesis, experimental design to control inherent variation, and interpreted analyses to facilitate understanding of dairy relationships. Emphasis is placed on assurance that milk response differences due to dietary treatments will have a high probability of being detected as significant. Guidelines addressing these principles along with suggested computer programs are presented. Results of two dairy nutrition experiments are included to illustrate use of the presented guidelines to maximize detection of real differences in milk response due to dietary treatments.
Keywords
Experimental Design, Dairy
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Lowry, Stephen R.
(1989).
"STATISTICAL DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF DAIRY NUTRITION EXPERIMENTS TO IMPROVE DETECTION OF MILK RESPONSE DIFFERENCES,"
Conference on Applied Statistics in Agriculture.
https://doi.org/10.4148/2475-7772.1452
STATISTICAL DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF DAIRY NUTRITION EXPERIMENTS TO IMPROVE DETECTION OF MILK RESPONSE DIFFERENCES
The objective of many dairy nutrition experiments is to determine the effect of certain dietary treatments on milk production and quality responses. However, milk responses are quite variable and cows (experimental units) are expensive and have substantial maintenance costs. This manuscript reviews principles for planning to obtain good data relevant to the hypothesis, experimental design to control inherent variation, and interpreted analyses to facilitate understanding of dairy relationships. Emphasis is placed on assurance that milk response differences due to dietary treatments will have a high probability of being detected as significant. Guidelines addressing these principles along with suggested computer programs are presented. Results of two dairy nutrition experiments are included to illustrate use of the presented guidelines to maximize detection of real differences in milk response due to dietary treatments.
