The publication is devoted to the development of a method for assessing the quality of wheat grain based on Harrington’s desirability function, which reflects the nonlinearity of the relationship between the quantitative values of quality indicators and the psychological perception of a person. As an empirical base, we used the results of studies on the protein content, gluten content and sedimentation index – Zeleny test of more than 40 varieties of winter wheat, zoned in the Oryol region, the main analysis tool was the factor analysis by the method of principal components. It is substantiated that the set of these wheat grain quality indicators can be described with one slight distortion by one main factor, along with particular desirability functions used to construct a generalized quality indicator with linguistic levels “very good”, “good”, “satisfactory”, “bad” and “very bad”. The calculation of the values of the main factor of wheat varieties, which are absent in the initial data array, is proposed using an approximate formula that takes into account the indicator that is most closely correlated with it - the protein content. The proposed methodology was tested on the example of assessing the influence of sowing dates on the productivity of winter wheat variety Moscow 39. Based on the results of the studies, it is recommended to use the Harrington’s transformation to evaluate particular indicators of the quality of wheat grain. It is also promising to use the method of principal components for the formation of a generalized function of desirability, when the weights of particular indicators are taken into account “automatically” by using the main component as a normalized variable, which comprehensively reflects the quality of wheat grain.

No abstract

Animal husbandry has been one of the priority areas for the development of agriculture in the Russian Federation over the past decade. One of the factors which gave impetus to its development is the adoption of policies of import substitution, which led not only to increased demand for livestock products due to the limitation of imports from countries that joined sanctions against Russia, but also the development of production sectors that ensure the functioning of this direction of agriculture, in particular agricultural engineering enterprises, producing forage machinery and equipment for maintenance of beef and dairy herds. The analysis of dynamics of changes of quantitative composition of the forage machines fleet shows that over the past three decades there has been a steady tendency to its permanent reduction, due primarily to a decrease in the number of livestock and, as a consequence, the reduction of lands under fodder crops and the general trend of increasing the saturation of machines in agriculture that can significantly increase their productivity. Along with obvious advantages, such as, for example, saving fuel and lubricants and wages due to a reduction in the number of runs on the field, such trends carry a number of risks associated with possible downtime to eliminate the consequences of failures and, as a result, violation of agrotechnical harvesting deadlines. Foreign companies that have moved their assembly plants to the territory of the Russian Federation and have fulfilled the requirements for localization of production often leave the production of spare parts outside its borders, which can not be considered as a positive factor from the point of view of food security. State support, which until recently was mainly directed at equipment manufacturers, did not fully stimulate the implementation of research and development work that could increase the competitiveness of national products over foreign ones, all other things being equal. These factors together dictate the need to conduct research on the prospects for the development of its market.

No abstract

The statistical analysis of the results of studies on the effect of sowing time on the yield and quality of winter wheat grains, from the perspective of multivariate variance analysis and multiple comparison of averages, is carried out in the article. It was found that the application of the procedure of a multivariate generalized linear model allows comparing the variants of experiments for all indicators in the aggregate. An important advantage of multiple comparisons over paired Student comparisons is also the ability to isolate homogeneous subgroups of experiments. In this study, post hoc comparisons according to the Tukey criterion were applied, the results of which are presented in tables of homogeneous experiment subgroups and multiple comparisons of indicators’ differences. The distribution of experiment variants by zones of desirability of Harrington functions of yield and generalized indicator of grain quality, depending on shift of sowing time is also presented. It is justified that the maxima of yield and quality of winter wheat grains provide a sowing period of 10 days later than previously recommended for the region. The use of multivariate dispersion analysis and multiple comparison of average increases the reliability of statistical conclusions, allows you to distinguish homogeneous versions of experiments in agricultural production.