ON INDICES THAT GENERALIZE THE LAND EQUIVALENT RATIO (LER) – EXPERIMENTS WITH ONLY ONE INTERCROPPING SYSTEM.
Euclides
Braga MALHEIROS[1]
§ ABSTRACT: In order to evaluate
combined yield of component crops of one intercropping system or the efficiency
of intercropping on sole cropping, several authors recommend the use of
indices. LER index is the must used but it does not take into consideration if
crops yields are according to the farmer will. Some generalizations of LER are
presented in the literature as: COMBINED LER, EFFECTIVE LER and SLER. They and
also LER deal with the ratio of random variables, with distributions that could
invalid the analysis of variance. The present study is based on simulated data
obtained from the computer and deals with the precision of the analysis for
these generalizations, taking only into consideration one system aiming the
expects yield for the main crop. It was observed that the analysis of variance
for COMBINED LER is not precise, independing on the value of ( however SLER
presented a satisfactory precision in all studied case. Precision for EFFECTIVE
LER depends on the value of ).
§ KEYWORDS: Intercropping; indices; analysis of variance precision.