PJB-2022-1538
Economic feasibility of supplementary foliar fertilization for wheat cultivars under rainfed conditions
Fathi A. Omer
Abstract
At the beginning of any growing season, farmers’ decision for selecting a profitable crop depends mainly on marketing and marginal rate of return. Selecting high yield and profitable wheat cultivar and production practices such as fertilization and in order to propose acceptable recommendations for farmers, a combination between soil and foliar application of fertilizers to investigate the growth and yield of different wheat cultivars in relation to economic feasibility and profitability was planned. Accordingly, this study was conducted during the growing seasons 2019/2020 in Duhok area to study the economic feasibility of supplementary foliar fertilization for different cultivars of wheat as well as studying their growth and yield performance under rainfed environments. Five wheat cultivars (Adana99, Ceyhan-99, Tamoz, Creso, IRIDE) and four forms of fertilization: control, conventional DAP, Foliar fertilizer EcoZink and both DAP plus foliar fertilizers were suggested as the study factors with four replications arranged in Randomized Complete Block Design and data were analyzed using computing application of GenStat program.
Results showed promising findings. All growth and mainly spike characters were improved differently by fertilizer application and also reflected positively on the final grain yield. The final grain yield was increased significantly by fertilization in which DAP plus Foliar fertilizer recorded highest grain yield (5.59 t.ha-1) followed by Foliar and DAP fertilizers and each gave 5.22 and 4.82 compared to 3.87 for control treatment respectively. It’s also observed that the revenue or outcome for all wheat cultivars was high in all fertilizer treatments compared to non fertilization of control treatment; DAP plus Foliar gave highest revenue (1930.97 $.ha-1) followed by Foliar and then DAP fertilizer treatments. On the other hand, higher outcome not meaning higher profitability and according to the economic and marginal rate of return analyses, spending every single unit of US$ from Foliar fertilization gained 182.91 $ compared to 13.8$ and 12.2$ for each of DAP plus Foliar and DAP treatments, respectively. Based on the spike characters and yield improvements by foliar fertilization and high marginal rate of retune, supplementary application of Foliar EcoZink alone or with DAP fertilizer is highly recommended for the farmers and also further studies are suggested in similar conditions and on other types of foliar fertilization to support the obtained findings in this study.
To Cite this article:
Omer, F.A. 2022. Economic feasibility of supplementary foliar fertilization for wheat cultivars under rainfed conditions. Pak. J. Bot., 54(5): DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.30848/PJB2022-5(30)
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