Project Title: Assessment of Fertilizers on Crops

Fundamental to improving crop yield is the necessity to quantify effects of such factors as crop varieties, nutrients, and fertilizers on crop yields. Statisticians have been integral to this effort for a century. Ronald Fisher, one of statistics' most important historical figures, developed his principles of experimental design in the context of agricultural field trials in the 1910s and 20s. Fisher invented statistical models to account for confounding factors affecting crop yields such as soil type or weather. These principles, along with new statistical methods, continue to have an important role in agricultural research. For example, developments in spatial statistical models have contributed to precision agriculture, a farm management strategy that uses global positioning systems to target interventions to the needs of a crop at a specific location in a field. One of the first uses of some techniques in statistics goes back to 1920s for the purpose of testing the effectiveness of fertilizers on plots of lands. The objective of this exercise was to see if different amounts of fertilizers are yielding different amounts of crops. Recently, a scientist at one of the top agricultural colleges in the U.S. decided to conduct this experiment on some new fertilizers and was interested to see the impact of them on crop yields. Accordingly, she selected three types of fertilizers A, B, and C and applied fertilizer A to 20 1- acre plots of land, fertilizer B to another 20 plots, and fertilizer C to yet another plots of land. At the end of growing season, the crop yields were recorded and is summarized in the data file named: Fertilizer Worksheet You are expected to analyze the project in two phases: Phase1: a) Describe the problem background, objective of study and identify the type of scale of measurement for the data b) Use appropriate descriptive statistics to explore and summarize the data for fertilizer A and C and compare their results. Remember to interpret the findings accurately and present them in a clear and coherent way. c) Assuming data for crop yield using fertilizer A, is normally distributed, calculate the parentage of plots of land that yield crops between 492 and 600 units (use only whole numbers in the descriptive statistics) d) Assuming crop yield (in bushels) using fertilizer A, is distributed normally with a population mean yield of 570 bushels and population standard deviation of 40 bushels, then what is the probability that a randomly selected plot of land can yield more than 600 bushels? e) Referring to part d, if a randomly selected plot of land is in the top 1 percent crop production, at least how much production should the land have?