Paper Details

Abstract

Tomatoes are well known for their quality and nutritional value all over the world. It provides approximately 40% of the daily required vitamin C and vitamin A to support human health. This vegetable is usually grown in high tunnels, but in these structures, the natural pollinators (insects, birds, wind, and mammals, etc.) are not available that badly affect the yield. To avoid this issue, an artificial pollinator was used to evaluate its performance at three different frequency levels (70, 85and 100Hz) for the Sahel hybrid cultivar. The proposed research performed a comparative analysis between natural and artificial pollination to explore the perspective of practical application. Considering the specific floral morphology and physiological characteristics of plant flowers during the pollination phase, the research scrutinizes the impact of artificial pollination. Results indicated that artificial pollination significantly improved crop performance over natural pollination in regrad of fruit number, average fruit weight, total fruit count and in yield upto 40, 9.82, 34.5 and 37.04% respectively. Among the studied frequencies, the 85Hz frequency produced the highest yield (37kg). Average fruit weight of four treatments plants was close to each other,and remained relatively consistent (≈115 ± 8 g) across treatments. A one-way ANOVA analysis demonstrated a significant impact of artificial pollination on the number of fruit, yield, and fruit conversion (p < 0.01). The suggested pollination frequency (85Hz) increased the fruit set of the crop. These findings contribute to a theoretical framework for artificial pollination methodology. The research results can support the use of artificial pollination devices for mimicking natural pollination.

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