Abstract
The potential yield of annual crops is affected by management practices and water and energy availabilities throughout the crop season. The current work aimed to assess the effects of plant population, planting dates and soil covering on yield components of maize. Field experiments were carried out during the 2014–2015 and 2015–2016 growing seasons at areas grown with oat straw, voluntary plants and bare soil, considering five plant populations (40,000, 60,000, 80,000, 100,000 and 120,000 plants ha−1) and three sowing dates (15 September, 30 October and 15 December) for the hybrid P30F53YH in Ponta Grossa, State of Paraná, Brazil. Non-impacts of soil covering or plant population on plant height at the flowering phenological stage were observed. Significant effects of soil covering on yield components and final yield responses throughout the 2014–2015 season were detected. An influence of plant populations on yield components was evidenced, suggesting that, from 80,000 plants ha−1, the P30F53YH hybrid performs a compensatory effect among assessed yield components in such a way as to not compromise productivity insofar as the plant population increases up to 120,000 plants ha−1. It was noticed, a positive trend of yield components and crop final yield as a function of plant density increments.
Highlights
Final productivity of a crop turns out to be an ultimate result of interactions among all their yield components at different agricultural ecosystems
A positive impact on the yield was found for all plant populations irrespective of the sowing date, except for the second sowing date of the 2014–2015 growing season, where no effect was identified due to reductions in the yield observed from 120,000 plants per hectare
Keeping a given plant population fixed, one can evaluate the isolated effect of the coverage on maize yield, identifying the portion of the effects considered to be random in comparison to those effectively generated by action of the coverage
Summary
Final productivity of a crop turns out to be an ultimate result of interactions among all their yield components at different agricultural ecosystems. The potential compensation among yield components might be expressed as a function of variations in the plant population [1] and sowing dates [2], which will, in turn, condition prevailing regimes of meteorological variables throughout the whole crop-growing season at a local scale [3]. Meteorological conditions in conjunction with management systems and plant populations lead to different productive potentials. [4], scrutinizing the influence of local meteorological variables associated with plant population, obtained coefficients of correlation of 0.93, 0.96, and 0.96 between crop yield and cumulative solar radiation flux density, air temperature and number of days of the crop cycle, respectively. The same authors observed that a different plant population, ranging from 75,000 and 120,000 plants ha−1 , culminated in maximum biological and economical yields for maize.
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