Effects of fertilization on some quantitative and qualitative characteristics of winter wheat in Great Cumania

Abstract

Due to the drastically increasing food prices during the last few years in Europe and also in Hungary, good and medium quality winter wheat varieties produced at low costs with high yield potential came to the front. Although food overproduction is characteristic to one part, while shortage of food to the other part of the world, the newest tendencies show an increasing role of the production and consumption of high quality food that can be produced only from high quality raw materials. When a new variety is certified, the qualitative parameters are more and more important beyond the quantitative ones. Several programmes were started to breed and produce winter wheat varieties with excellent qualitative parameters including the determination of the adequate, variety-and habitat specific agrotechniques and plant nutrition. In Karcag Research Institute plant breeding and long-term fertilization experiments have been carried out separately from one another for several decades. In the vegetation period of 2012/2013 a new series of experiments was started that includes the determination of the fertilizer doses optimal for our high quality winter wheat varieties with high yield potential. The determination of the adequate and optimal fertilizer doses are essential not only from economic point of view and lower environmental loads, but also for the most effective utilization of the genetic potential of our winter wheat varieties without the degradation of the qualitative parameters. After the assessment of the data we established that extreme high doses of fertilizers are needed for the spectacular improvement of the parameters we examined. As the financial possibilities of farmers are limited, the fertilizer cost is a determining factor: they have to consider if the yield or the quality of a given variety can be increased at an affordable fertilizer input. Our goal is to determine the often empiric hence not so accurate fertilizer doses more precisely providing the producers a proper production technology and plant nutrition recipe adequate to the varieties bred by us. Due to the complexity of this topic high number of further examinations is required.