Potato grown for early or off-season production plays a crucial role in the economy of several areas in the Mediterranean countries. Irrigation is important for determining yield and earliness, thus a better investigation of plant response under various pedo-climatic conditions can help to improve resource use efficiency and farmer income. A two-year field research (2009-2010) was carried o...

Dwindling water resources combined with meeting the demands for food security require maximizing water use efficiency (WUE) both in rainfed and irrigated agriculture. In this regard, deficit irrigation (DI), defined as the administration of water below full crop-water requirements (evapotranspiration), is a valuable practice to contain irrigation water use. In this study, the mechanism of paclo...

Eucalyptus plantations occupy almost 20 million ha worldwide and exceed 3.7 million ha in Brazil alone. Improved genetics and silviculture have led to as much as a three-fold increase in productivity in Eucalyptus plantations in Brazil and the large land area occupied by these highly productive ecosystems raises concern over their effect on local water supplies. As part of the Brazil Potential ...

in the vast rainfed regions, diminishing returns from the public irrigation systems, climate change induced chaotic fluctuations in the hydrologic regimes and a large demand-supply gap in non-cereal food items are all compelling reasons for the need to realise the production potential of rainfed farming areas. Little control over the rainfall and absence of suitable mechanisms for storing or co...

Potato productivity in the northeastern US has been relatively constant for over 50 years, raising questions about what factors are limiting productivity. Research was initiated in 2004 to identify key constraints to potato productivity by evaluating Status Quo (SQ), Soil Conserving (SC), and Soil Improving (SI) cropping systems under both rainfed and irrigated management, and it was found that...

Water deficit is an important factor limiting crop growth all over the world. In order to evaluate genetic variation, heritability and the interrelationship between agronomic traits, twenty chickpea genotypes were cultivated in two separated randomized complete block experiments with three replications under normal irrigated and rainfed conditions. The experiments were carried out at the Agricu...

With uncertainty in future irrigation water availability and regulations on nutrient application amounts, experimentally determined effects of “controllable” management strategies such as nitrogen (N), water, and their combination on crop water productivity (CWP, also known as crop water use efficiency) and actual evapotranspiration (ETa) are essential. The effects of various N application rate...

Both rainfed and irrigated soybean production are important in Nebraska (western US Corn Belt), accounting for a respective 48 and 52% of the state’s soybean production of 7 Mt on a respective 55 and 45% share of the state soybean area of 1.9 Mha. To date, no assessment of factors that may account for regional and inter-annual variation in yield and irrigation amount has been performed. To acco...

A study was made of how water status (rainfed vs. irrigated) and crop load (no cluster thinning vs. cluster thinning) can together affect the grapes of Vitis vinifera cv. Tempranillo vines growing in a semiarid zone of Extremadura (Spain). The grapes were monitored at different stages of ripening, measuring the peroxidase (POX) and superoxide dismutase (SOD) antioxidant activities and the pheno...