Long-term experiments and strip plot designs

In a long-term experiment usually the experimenter needs to know whether the effect of a treatment varies over time. But time usually has both a fixed and a random effects over the output and the difficulty in the analysis depends on the particular design considered and the availability of covariates. Actually, as shown in the paper, the presence of covariates can be very useful to model the random effect of time. In this paper a model to analyze data from a long-term strip plot design with covariates is proposed. Its effectiveness will be tested using both simulated and real data from a crop rotation experiment.