Evaluation of the coefficients of variation and estimation of plot size and sample in experiments in swine

Abstract

With the rapid increase in population and also the demand for food, the agricultural sector is gaining more and more space to expand, necessitating techniques and studies that integrate new technologies that allow a productive increase. Swine farming, as a sector of great relevance in the Brazilian meat production, being fourth largest exporter of pork, is an agricultural sector with great notoriety in the development of technologies aimed at optimize production. However, the number of studies focused on the experimental area is very small, evidencing the importance of knowing all the variables involved in experiments to obtain increasingly reliable results, optimizing the costs. In addition to the limiting factors faced by such research, such as the high cost of experiments, bioethical and animal welfare issues have led research reduce the number of animals in experimentation, and the lack of information causes many researchers to draw incorrect conclusions, since a small number of animals can invalidate the results obtained. In this way, important aspects should be considered, such as coefficient of variation, plot size and number of samples, since all of these have a great effect on the experimental variation in swine farming. The objective of the project is to verify the existing variation, to establish classification ranges of coefficients of variation for the main response variables in industrial swines, and to estimate the optimal sizes of experimental plot and sample, so as to guide the researcher in relation to the precision of the data of your research. (AU)