Assessment of crop water requirement and yield attributes of groundnut under drip irrigation with black plastic mulch

Abstract

Groundnut (Arachis hypogaea L.) variety of TAG-24 was selected for the experiment with four treatments namely drip-T1, drip with mulch-T2, mulch-T3 and control-T4. The research objective is to study crop-water requirement, uniformity coefficient, yield attributes such as yield, plant height, root length, number of pods m-2, seed and shell weight m-2. Crop water requirement (CWR) for groundnut crop was calculated as 449.1 mm by CROPWAT 8.0 Software. Experiments were conducted by supplying different amount of water among various treatments such as 100% of CWR in T4, 90% of CWR in T1 & T3 and 80% CWR in T2 respectively. Uniformity coefficient was found as 0.86 for drip irrigation. Highest and lowest yield was reported in T2 as 4.45 t ha-1 and 2.89 t ha-1 in T4. Among all the treatments plant height and root length was reported highest as 52 cm and 48 cm in T2, similarly number of podsm-2, seed and shell weight m-2 were reported highest as 583, 0.47 kg and 0.24 kg in T2 respectively. The yield attributes were observed highest in T2 because of efficient water application at root zone by drip, controlled weed growth and conserved soil moisture by mulch which creates favorable conditions for plant growth.