Duration of Soil Water Content between Field Capacity and Wilting Point and Its Effect on Growth of Some Aerobic Rice Cultivars (Oryza sativa L.)

Abstract

Soil water content management is important cultural practices to improve growth and yield of crops. This report was conducted to investigate the duration of soil water content between field capacity (FC) and wilting point (WP) and its effects on growth of aerobic rice cultivars. Experiment was carried out using factorial design i.e. Varieties (Inpago 8 (V1), IR64 (V2) and Situbagendit (V3), combined with 3 soil types based on locations taken i.e.: Maros (M), Gowa (G) and Jeneponto (J) for evapotranspiration and together with control (unplanted) for evaporation measurements. Watering requirement was calculated based on data from soil tester device. Results indicated that varietal difference was not significantly different in all soil source type. Longest soil water contents duration between FC and WP (18 days) recorded by Maros soil under evaporation and 14 days under evapotranspiration. However, plant performance was low compared to other soil source perhaps due to soil structure. The highest number of leaves per plant was shown by GV2 and JV2 (19.4 leaves), plant height by GV1 (30.21 cm), plant fresh weight in GV3 (28.47 g), plant dry weight by GV3 (8.1 g), number of tillers/plant was obtained by the treatments combination GV1 and GV2 (6 tillers) and shoot/root ratio by JV2 (4.9). Understanding the duration of soil water content between FC and WP for each soil types is very important to saving water and our results showed that it could be implemented for a better rice production in aerobic rice in the very near future.