Assessing Potential of Maize Hybrids under Varying Tillage Practices

Changing tillage practices can affect soil characteristics and conditions for seed germination along with effecting crop production drastically. Therefore, a field experiment was conducted to find out the effect of different tillage practices on the potential of maize hybrids at Agronomic Research farm, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad during the 2nd week of March 2019. Two hybrids of maize (H1=YH-1898 and H2=DK-9108) were sown under four tillage practices (T0=Zero Tillage, T1=Minimum Tillage, T2=Conventional Tillage and T3=Deep Tillage. Data regarding leaf area index, leaf area duration, total dry matter, crop growth rate, plant height, cob length, yield per cob, 1000-grain weight, number of grain rows per cob, grain yield, cob height and cob girth were recorded using standard procedures. The collected data were analyzed statistically by using Fisher’s analysis of variance technique and honestly significant difference at 5% probability was used to compare the differences among treatments means. Maximum crop productivity was achieved with minimum tillage with DK-9108 hybrid in comparison to other tillage practices. An increase of 11.7% in thousand grain weight, 3.4% increase in cob girth and 17.7% increase in grain yield was observed by changing the hybrid. Whereas 34% yield increment was noticed with deep tillage in comparison to traditional practices providing 34% more profit to the farmers. However, interaction of both hybrid and tillage practices could not increase maize yield significantly.