Crop physiology: A perspective for southern Africa

Abstract

Crop physiology is a broad subject and a comprehensive treatise of all its aspects is impossible, even in a whole volume dedicated to the subject. With a few exceptions, plant physiology, rather than crop physiology, is commonly the focus when physiological aspects of plant growth and development are reviewed in biological sciences. Plant and crop physiology are distinguishable by the manner in which one is almost purely basic and the other tends towards application of the science in crop management. Therefore, the objective of this review was to highlight crop production-oriented physiological research that has shaped our current knowledge and research activities in the past few decades, especially the latter part of the past century. Source-sink relationships, stress physiology, mineral nutrition and seed physiology were identified as the key aspects of crop physiology that influence crop production. Each of these aspects is addressed to identify its significance in crop performance and to highlight both the breakthroughs and gaps in our contemporary knowledge of crop physiology. There was no attempt to provide fundamental interpretations. The reader is referred to relevant appraisals of crop and plant physiology, to gain further insight into original data. Since the review is also meant to contribute to further education in crop production, views on the challenge of training future crop scientists are expressed in the final section.

Planting Dates and Harvesting Stages Influence on Maize Yield under Rain-Fed Conditions

“…This could be attributed to their strong dependence on their genetics make up and could be only hinder by severe environmental stresses. This current research agreed with Modi and Greenfield (2010) reported that reduction in grain yield experienced with extreme weather conditions was due to increase in the duration of the grain-filling and decrease in the rate of grain filling which were insufficient to prevent grain yield loss. Also, Hasanuzzaman et al (2013) reported that the accumulated high temperatures could have caused an array of morphological, physiological and biochemical changes within plant such as decrease in the number of grains and kernel weight.…”