Impact of Irrigation Water Quantities and Soil Mulching on Pearl Millet Performance under Heat Stress Conditions

Document Type : Original Article

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Plant Production Department, Ecology and Dry Land Agriculture Division, Desert Research Center, El-Matariya, Cairo, Egypt

Abstract

DROUGHT and heat stress are considered the most abiotic stresses that affecting crop production in desert areas. Accordingly, two field trials during the 2019 and 2020 were performed at the Agricultural Experiment Station of Desert Research Center, EL-Kharga Oasis, New Valley Governorate, Egypt, to investigate the response of pearl millet to three irrigation levels (100, 75, and 50 % of the water requirement) and five rates of soil mulch (0, 2.4, 4.8, 7.2 and 9.5ton ha-1) under predominant water-scarce and heat stress conditions. The findings showed that pearl millet yields and their traits, as well as grain protein content and water use efficiency (WUE), were significantly affected by mulching, irrigation levels, and their interaction in both seasons. Soil mulching by 9.5ton ha-1 gave the highest values for plant height, panicle length, and WUE as compared with un-mulching in both seasons. Whereas, the highest values of grains number/panicle, grain weight/panicle, seed index, biological and grain yields as well as grain protein content were recorded with mulching by 7.2ton ha-1 as compared to un-mulching in both seasons. Fully irrigated pearl millet recorded the highest values for all the studied attributes, except WUE, but statistically at par with 75% of the water requirement and each of was over 50% of the water requirement in both seasons. It can be inferred that adding 7.2ton ha-1 soil mulch and 75% of the water requirement may be the optimal practice to improve the productivity of pearl millet in hyper-arid areas.

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