Performances of early and late maturing oat varieties in cold regions

Abstract

Oats are widely used in cold regions as forage and grain crop, with early maturing oat varieties having long planting history. More attention is paid to variety maturity, including both naked and hulled types, for production in cold regions. Despite wide planting of early maturing oat in the cold regions in China, no systematic evaluation on yield and quality of the oat varieties in these regions has been conducted. Qinghai and Inner Mongolia are typically cold regions in China due to high elevation and high latitude respectively, and are representative areas for experimentation on growing oats in cold regions. In this study, we tested production and quality of early and late maturing oat varieties at five locations in Qinghai Province and one location in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Regions. We measured several growth, yield and quality parameters of four early maturing and three late maturing oat varieties in the former locations and six early maturing and one late maturing oat varieties at the latter locations. Parameters measured included leaf length, leaf width, panicle length, dry forage yield, seed yield crude protein and others. Attention was primarily paid to oats maturity due to the emphasis on forage and crop productivity without cons derma for to what the varieties were naked and hulled. The results showed that, in the regions of Qinghai Province with high altitude, forage yield and quality parameters of the early maturing varieties were not significantly different from those of the late maturing varieties. However, seed yield of the early maturing varieties (3702 kg/hm2) was significantly higher than that of the late maturing varieties (2759 kg/hm2) ( P <0.05). In the regions of Inner Mongolia with high latitude, the dried forage yield (3209 kg/hm2) and seed yield (8110 kg/hm2) of the early maturing varieties were significantly higher than those of the late maturing varieties. But the crude protein content in the early maturing varieties was not significantly with late maturing varieties. Our study shows that production and properties of early maturing oats used for forage and grain is similar to normally higher yielding late maturing oats, indicating that early maturing oats are better than late maturing varieties to the short grow season in cold regions. Therefore, early maturing oat varieties should be used as both cereal and forage in the cold regions.