Maize Growth, Yield Formation and Water-Nitrogen Usage in Response to Varied Irrigation and Nitrogen Supply Under Semi-Arid Climate

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Enhancement of resource use efficiencies and crop productivity in sustainable agriculture are importantespecially in low-input production systems. This experiment was planned to evaluate the performance of maizeunder different water and nitrogen levels. Three irrigation treatments i.e., I1= three leaf stage (V1), nine leafstage (V2), tasseling (T) and milking stage (M); I2 = V1, V2, T, M and dough stage (R1), I3= V1, V2,T, M , R1 and blister stage (R2) were applied with 70 mm application depth with different nitrogen applicationrates i.e., 0 , 150, 200 and 250 kg N ha-1. Results revealed that maximum growth i.e., plant height, leaf areaindex (LAI), crop growth rate (CGR), cob length and diameter as well as yield and yield components i.e.,grains rows/cob, grains/row, grains/cob, grain weight/cob, 100-grain weight, grain yield, biological yield andharvest index, water and nitrogen use efficiencies as well as transpiration and photosynthetic activities wererecorded at I3 with 250 kg N ha-1. However, increased irrigation and nitrogen application rates delayed days totasseling, silking and maturity. Conclusively, six irrigations (I3) with 250 kg N ha-1 can be adopted as the bestinput levels to get maximum maize yield under semi-arid regions. In future both these inputs may be used aswater and nitrogen based agricultural best management practices (BMPs) in regions with similar type ofenvironmental conditions.