Effect of Row Spacing and Plant Density on the Yield of Faba bean L. Under Very Differentiated Humidity Conditions

Janusz Prusiński

doi:10.5539/jas.v14n1p1

Abstract

The research covered Polish low-tannin Faba bean &lsquo;Albus&rsquo;, and its yielding depending on the row spacing and plant density under very different humidity conditions across the research years. The mean multi-year faba bean seed yield was 4.01 t ha-1 and it was most correlated with the total rainfall in August and in June-August. Due to a considerable variation in the total rainfall and air temperature, the faba bean seed yield ranged from 0.69-2.14 t ha-1 in dry years (2018-2019) with high air temperature, from 6.64 to 6.59 ha-1 in humid years (2016-2017) with a considerably higher total rainfall and lower air temperature in June-August. There was no significant effect of the row spacing and plant density on the faba bean yielding, except for a significantly lower seed yield in 2019 following the application of the lowest plant density. Out of all the yield structure components, only the number of pods per plant for 60-75 plants per m2 was significantly lower than for 45 plants. The other yield structure components did not differ significantly due to the factors studied either, except for the LAI, the value of which for a narrow row spacing was significantly higher. There was found a significant correlation between all the plant traits and with the faba bean yield.

Highlights

Introducing legumes to the crop rotations of cereals and oil plants enhances agriculture’s a sustainable development as part of the EU from-farm-to-fork strategy (Costa et al, 2021)
The results reported by Gidey (2016) point to a significant importance of the number of seeds per pod and the number of pods per plant for faba bean yielding
The success of faba bean growing was mostly determined by the total rainfall during growth and generative development in successive years

Summary

Introduction

Introducing legumes to the crop rotations of cereals and oil plants enhances agriculture’s a sustainable development as part of the EU from-farm-to-fork strategy (Costa et al, 2021). Faba bean acreage covers 2.5 m ha and comes 5th in the legume sowings, after beans, pea, chickpea and lentil, with its annual production of 4.5 m tonnes allocated to the production of food, animal feed and green manure production almost across the country (Muktadir et al, 2020, Duc et al, 2015). The primary cultivation objective today, next to the seed yield, is an adaptation of cultivars to drought (Abdellatif et al, 2012; Cernay, 2015; Khazaei et al, 2021) to decrease their yielding variation (Nadeem et al, 2019). Physiological and biochemical changes at the successive development stages in plants (Abid et al, 2017; Muktadir et al, 2020), which triggers a considerable yield variation in faba bean (Cernay et al, 2015). A high faba bean yielding is accompanied by a high interaction between the cultivar and the environmental conditions (Skovbjerg et al, 2020)

Methods

Results

Conclusion