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EFFECT OF NITROGEN ON GROWTH, YIELD AND FIBER QUALITY TRAITS OF COTTON GENOTYPES UNDER SEMI-ARID CONDITIONS

Ali Sher, Ijaz Ahmad, Saba Iqbal Rao, Abdul Shakoor*, Muhammad Rizwan Khurshid, Muhammad Zafar, Amina Iftkhar, Asma Parveen, Saima Naseer, Saba Saeed, Mustazhar Billah Zafar, Asif Imran

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Abstract

                         Nitrogen (N) management is of prime importance because it’s play a dominant role in growth and development and consider a limiting factor of various cotton genotypes. Moreover, genotypes also differ on the basis of N mediated growth, yield and quality traits. An experiment was conducted to optimize N rates for varying cotton genotypes to improve growth, yield and fiber quality traits. Experiment was conducted at University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Pakistan. Experiment was laid out in Randomized Complete Block Design with factorial arrangements with combinations N₁ × C₁, N₁ × C₂, N₁ × C₃, N₂ × C₁, N₂ × C₂, N₂ × C₃, N₃ × C₁, N₃ × C₂, N₃ × C₃ and replicated thrice. Comparatively, more total and opened bolls per plant, seed cotton yield per hectare, fiber length, fiber strength, fiber elongation were observed with 250 kg N ha^-1 and fiber uniformity and ginning out turn with 200 kg ha^-1over control. While, genotypes FH-142 and MNH-886 depicted significant enhancement in yield and delay in senescence related attributes than FH-114 for most of instances. However, genotype MNH-886 in most of the cases and genotype FH-421 in some cases depicted more promising results than other genotypes on the basis of evaluated attributes. Conclusively, N application enhanced growth, yield related attributes and fiber quality traits. Comparatively more N triggered improvement in yield, fiber uniformity and fiber strength was observed for genotype MNH-886 but fiber length, fiber elongation and ginning out turn was observed for genotype FH-142.

Keywords

Boll opening, Boll weight, Seed index, Ginning out turn, Fiber length, Fiber strength, Fiber uniformity, Fiber elongation