Physiological Analysis of the Effects of Different Soils on Sugar Beet Crops in Different Years

Effect of cultivar, sowing date, and harvest date on yields and sugar contents of beet on a dry land site in Canterbury

“…LAIs, which are the main determinant of sugar beet yield (Goodman 1968), were considerably lower than the LA1 of 4 or 5 considered to be the optimum in Britain (Goodman 1968), particularly for the September sowing (Fig. lg).…”

“…comm.). Nitrogen is important in sugar beet leaf growth (Goodman 1968), and the application of 52 kg/ha N may have been either inadequate or not fully utilised because of the dry conditions. An increase in plant population would have increased LA1 at the expense of net assimilation rate, resulting in no increase in sugar yield (Goodman 1966).…”

“…This was partly because it had a higher LA1 from February to June (Table 2), improving its light interception and sugar production (Goodman 1968;Scott & Jaggard 1978). A similar interaction between sugar yields of Monoblanc, Yellow Daeno, and Amono sugar beet obtained by Drewitt (1979) may have resulted from differences in leaf area, as Monoblanc had the highest weight of tops.…”

“…Top-yields were low compared with the 25-55 t/ha obtained in Britain (Nuttall 1979), but the leaf areas were too. If optimum leaf areas (Goodman 1968) had been obtained, top-yields might also have been considerably higher.…”

Variation in yield between two similar sandy loam soils. I. Description of soils and measurement of yield differences

“…A series of multi-site experiments followed by a regression analysis (Veitch & Stynes, 1979;Morrison, 1980) can identify the main common causes of variation, such as differences in water availability, but leaves unexplained the often considerable variation caused by factors that are not common to many of the sites. A third approach is to study two soils of quite different character so as to quantify the way in which each of their different properties is likely to affect yield (Goodman, 1968;Cooke & Williams, 1971). In all these cases the demonstration that the yield differences occur is relatively straightforward as a large number of sites are used or the differences between sites are large.…”