Evaluation of experimental designs in durum wheat trials

Variability among experimental plots may be a relevant problem in field genotype experiments, especially when a large number of entries are involved. Four field trials on 24 durum wheat genotypes were conducted in 2013/14 in order to evaluate the efficiency of Incomplete Block, Alpha and Augmented designs in comparison with the traditional Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD). The results showed that the RCBD can be replaced by an Alpha design, which provides better control of variability among the experimental units when the number of treatments to be tested in an experiment exceeds twenty. The ranking of the genotypes across the four designs was not constant.