Response of Summer Sweetcorn to Drip Irrigation and Crop Growth Based Fertigation Levels under High Density Planting

Enhancing nutrient use efficiency (NUE) and water use efficiency (WUE) are most critical and turn daunting research issues. A number of approaches are to be used in order to enhance water and nutrient use efficiency by reducing losses and to minimize the detrimental effect of water and nutrient stress in crop plants. This can be achieved through adoption of efficient methods of irrigation and fertilizer application. Field experiments were carried in, College of Agriculture, PJTSAU, Hyderabad, to determine the impact of drip irrigation and fertigation levels on the growth, yield and output of sweetcorn under high density planting during consecutive summer seasons of 2020 and 2021 respectively. Twelve treatment combinations (three levels of irrigation and four levels of fertigation through drip) with factorial concept. The results revealed that based on mean of two years, among irrigation levels, 1.0 Epan registered considerably higher growth parameters (plant height, leaf area and dry matter production), yield attributes (no. of cobs plant^-1, cob length, no. of kernels, cob weight, cob girth) and yield over 0.8 and 0.6 E pan. Among the fertigation levels, 125% RDNK in differential dosage (225-75-62.5 kg N, P₂O₅, K₂O ha^-1)in accordance with the crop coefficient curve resulted in significantly greater growth parameters, yield characteristics and yield.