Optimizing the Best Sowing Week by Employing Water Requirement Satisfaction Index for Maize and Sorghum for Selected Districts of Tamil Nadu

Abstract

Water Requirement Satisfaction Index (WRSI) is an indicator of crop performance based on the availability of soil moisture to crop needs to meet PET demand during a growing season. An attempt was made to identify the best sowing week for the selected districts of Tamil Nadu at Agro Climate Research Centre, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore for maize and sorghum using WRSI under dryland situation. The data of weekly rainfall and potential evapotranspiration for Dindigul, Theni and Namakkal districts were collected from the respective stations for a period of 30 years (1981 to 2010). The existing sowing window was obtained from the farmers with discussion for dryland conditions. Crop coefficients (Kc) values for the maize and sorghum crops for different crop growth stages were collected from Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)-Bulletin-56. From the study, it was found out that for sorghum and maize, the elasticity of the identified optimum sowing week was expanded from 35th Meteorological Standard Week (MSW) to 39th standard week for Dindigul Theni and Namakkal districts

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.2019.000315

Pages

586 - 589

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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