Studies on foliar spray of Zinc on normal and late sown rabi castor
Research Type
NARP Project
Experiment Background
Castor is one of the important cash crop in Gujarat cultivated on 5.73 lakh ha area, which produces 8.40 lakh tons of castor seed with average productivity 1466 kg per ha. Before two decades castor cultivation was confined only in kharif season as a contingent crop. But nowadays with the availability of short stature and short duration castor hybrids made it possible to cultivate castor commercially in kharif as well as in rabi season after the harvest of kharif crops and also in late rabi after sugarcane. But performance of rabi castor found to be greatly affected by abiotic stress either due to water deficits or climatic abnormalities occurred during pre-reproductive and reproductive stage. Among climatic abnormalities elevated temperature at raceme initiation significantly determine the length of raceme and sex expression especially in the late order racemes even under optimum soil moisture condition. The past studies revealed that altered sex ratio (maleness) due to stress are associated with changes in assimilation, transpiration, amino acid content and activities of enzyme relating to sink-source. Alison and Glenn (2010) reported that Zn nutrition exacerbate the adverse effect of short period heat stress in wheat. Supplementary Zn nutrition reduce a plant’s sensitivity to heat stress by increasing activity of the ROS-scavenging enzyme zinc-superoxide dismutase (Cakmak 2000, Bakardjiva et al. 2000). Mathukia Khanpara (2007) found that Zn increased the oil and K content in seed. Many researchers reveal that Zn plays a crucial role in oilseeds.
Experiment Group
Natural Resource Management
Unit Type
(01)RESEARCH UNIT
Unit
(53)AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH STATION (ACHHALIA)
Department
(287)Agricultural Research Station Achhalia
BudgetHead
(319/12091/03)319/07/REG/02112
Objective
To study the effect of different levels of zinc on growth, sex expression, yield and quality of castor