Yield and Physiological Attributes of Upland Rice as Influenced by Irrigation Scheduling and Live Mulching with Cowpea

Abstract

A field experiment was carried out in the farmer’s field, Peringammala, Kalliyoor, Thiruvananthapuram during the Virippu 2017 to study the effect of irrigation scheduling and live mulching with cowpea on physiological attributes and yield of upland rice. Results revealed that irrigation at 3 cm depth at 10 mm CPE (I1 ),live mulching with cowpea (M2 ) and their interaction (I1 M2 ) registered the highest grain and straw yield. The treatment I1 resulted in 92.4 per cent increase in grain yield compared to rainfed control (I7 ). The reduction in yield at wider irrigation treatment might be due to the severe moisture stress experienced especially during tillering and panicle initiation stage. Irrigation had a favourable influence on physiological characters like relative leaf water content and proline content. The frequent irrigation treatment (I1 ) recorded the highest relative leaf water content (80.32 per cent) while the rainfed treatment (I7 ) recorded the highest proline content (0.94 µmol g -1 FW). Thus for getting higher yield in upland rice, irrigation at 3 cm depth at 10 mm CPE and live mulching with cowpea can be recommended.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.2018.000183

Pages

463 - 465

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

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