Drip fertigation promotes water and nitrogen use efficiency and yield stability through improved root growth for tomatoes in plastic greenhouse production

By Jing Hu, G. Gettel, Z. Fan, Haofeng Lv, Yiming Zhao, Yalin Yu, Jingguo Wang, K. Butterbach‐Bahl, Guoyuan Li, Shan Lin. 2021

62 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Drip fertigation increases water and nitrogen use efficiency, and reduces nitrogen leaching in comparison to conventional flood irrigation and over fertilization in plastic greenhouse vegetable production. However, it is unknown whether this also improves yield stability, possibly through improved root growth. A two-factor field trial was conducted in a randomized block experimental design with drip vs. flood fertigation and with vs. without straw application over eleven growing seasons for six years with following treatments: (i) flood irrigation with over fertilization (conventional practice, hereafter CIF); (ii) CIF + Straw; (iii) drip fertigation with reduced irrigation and fertilization (hereafter DIF); (iv) DIF + Straw. The CIF treatments had application rates of 600 mm + 900 kg N ha−1 season−1 and DIF had 300 mm + 200 kg N ha−1 season−1. The ingrowth core method was used to measure root-growth characteristics, including root dry weight, root length density and specific root length. The water and nitrogen use efficiency and the inter-annual variation coefficient of tomato yield were also measured and calculated. There was no significant effect of straw on any of the variables measured, but there were significant differences related to CIF and DIF treatments. DIF had 101 % higher water use efficiency (p

Subfields: Plant Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2f42509b129de1c7057becbad69e47c84ae62af1