High fertigation frequency improves nitrogen uptake and crop performance in processing tomato grown with high nitrogen and water supply

Michela Farneselli, Paolo Benincasa, Giacomo Tosti, Eric Simonne, Marcello Guiducci and Francesco Tei

Agricultural Water Management, 2015, vol. 154, issue C, 52-58

Abstract: A 2-year field experiment was carried out in Central Italy on processing tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill., cv. PS1296) to assess the effect of fertigation–irrigation frequency on crop N uptake and yield. The crop was grown with three N-fertiliser rates (0, 100 and 300kgNha−1: N0, N100 and N300, respectively) applied at three different fertigation–irrigation weekly schedules: one fertigation (F1) for the fertilised treatments, or one irrigation (I1) for the unfertilised control; three fertigations (F3) for the fertilised treatments, or three irrigations (I3) for the unfertilised control; one fertigation+two irrigations (F1+I2) for the fertilised treatments. The N rates and fertigation–irrigation schedules were combined to realise a total of eight treatments: N0I1, N0I3, N100F1, N100F3, N100F1+I2, N300F1, N300F3, and N300F1+I2 (Table 1). All treatments received the same weekly water volume based on crop ETc estimated by the Penman–Monteith equation. We performed fortnightly measurements of crop growth and N accumulation, weekly measurements of NO3-N concentration in soil solution taken from suction lysimeters at depth of 0.6m, and a post-harvest measurement of soil mineral N content. At the highest N rate, a high frequency of fertigation and/or irrigation increased the uptake of fertiliser-N, guaranteed optimal crop N nutritional status even in the early stages and promoted crop growth but did not significantly affect fruit yield. Compared to fertigation frequency, irrigation frequency seems to be the main factor affecting N recovery at high fertiliser-N rate. Thus, high fertigation and/or irrigation frequency may represent a strategy to increase N uptake efficiency in processing tomato fed with very high N and water supply, which is often the case in intensive processing tomato production.

Keywords: Fertilisation; Nitrogen use efficiency; Mediterranean environment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377415000773
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:154:y:2015:i:c:p:52-58

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2015.03.002

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().