Abstract
Climate change affects global crop production year after year. Exploring the impact of different fertilization methods on crop yield stability has become an extremely important topic in sustainable agriculture. The objective of this study is to explore the effects of various fertilization regimes with climate variability on yield stability for sweet corn production in southern Taiwan. Three fertilization treatments composed of chemical fertilizer only (CF), integrated fertilizer (half organic/half chemical fertilizer) (IF), and organic fertilizer only (OF) were implemented from 2009 to 2018 based on the well-maintained soils since 1988. While the same amounts of these fertilizers were applied during the period, we found that different fertilization changed the marketable yields of fresh fruit (ear), which slightly increased for organic fertilizer, but substantially decreased for both chemical (p = 0.0001) and integrated (p = 0.0061) fertilizer. Thus, based on these 10 years of observation, yields among fertilization treatments were analyzed with weather and soil parameters to determine the possible factors involved. Both multiple linear regression equation (p < 0.0001, adj. R2 > 0.57) and regression tree analysis illustrated significantly negative correlations between average ear weight and relative humidity under the chemical fertilizer treatment. In this study, we show for the first time that chemical fertilizer had the lowest yield resilience in response to regional relative humidity change compared to organic and integrated fertilizers. Our results also indicate that specific soil microbes have the potential to help sweet corn face environmental vulnerability in subtropical regions.
Highlights
Yield stability is one of the critical indicators for agricultural sustainability
The results indicate that the application of chemical fertilizer (CF) was unable to maintain the sweet corn yield in the period of 2009–2018, especially for second ear yield (CF average first ear weight trend: y = −3.4461x + 321.08; average second ear weight trend: y = −7.1037x + 251.24)
We observed that the yields of sweet corn under organic fertilizer had the potential to surpass those under chemical fertilizer treatment, as the same amount of fertilizer was applied during the period of 2009–2018
Summary
Yield stability is one of the critical indicators for agricultural sustainability. Environmental complexity includes weather, soil, fertilization, and tillage methods diversely influence stable crop production [1]. Since the 1990s, the observed trend of global climate warming has become a great challenge to crop production in many locations around the world [2]. Soil quality has suffered from degradation and chemical abuse in many places throughout the world [3]. Until now, these abiotic stresses continue to impact crop production, posing a threat to production systems. A recent study found that temperature–yield relationships indicated that over 50% of the arable land exhibited yield susceptibility to past warming trends, with maize having the highest vulnerability in a regional scale [7]. Several reports have concluded that elevated CO2 much more likely increases maize yields in warm conditions than in cool environments, since warmer temperatures increase the photosynthetic rate [9,10,11]
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