Your comment about statistics and agriculture brought back a memory. I did my graduate work at Iowa State University which had a well regarded statistics program https://www.stat.iastate.edu/. ISU is the land grant college in Iowa. I remember after studying analysis of variance that the plot in the split plot model originally referred to plots of land. I guess I am not certain this is true, but it makes sense. I found this old document online. https://pdixon.stat.iastate.edu/stat571/handouts/split%20plot.pdf
Your comment about statistics and agriculture brought back a memory. I did my graduate work at Iowa State University which had a well regarded statistics program https://www.stat.iastate.edu/. ISU is the land grant college in Iowa. I remember after studying analysis of variance that the plot in the split plot model originally referred to plots of land. I guess I am not certain this is true, but it makes sense. I found this old document online. https://pdixon.stat.iastate.edu/stat571/handouts/split%20plot.pdf