Influence of Automated Sensor-Based Irrigation and Fertigation on Fruit Yield, Nutrient Utilization and Economics of Capsicum (Capsicum annuum L.)

ABSTRACT

Water and nutrition are the crucial inputs in the production of high value crops under protected condition, especially the quantity, quality, and timing schedule. A greenhouse experiment on capsicum was taken up for two season during 2020–21 with factorial concept and RCBD design. The experiment was conducted with three levels of automated sensor-based irrigation technology (I₁: 75% Available soil moisture (ASM), (I₂: 50% ASM and I₃: 25% ASM) and 4 levels of fertigation (F₁: 75% RDF, F₂: 100% Recommended Dose of Fertilizers (RDF), F₃: 125% RDF and F₄: 150% RDF) with 100% RDF and surface irrigation as control. The results revealed that combination of sensor-based irrigation schedule at 75% ASM with 125% RDF performed well with higher fruit yield (60089 kg ha⁻¹) and was 217.9% higher than the control. Automated scheduling of irrigation at 75% ASM with 150% RDF recorded higher total nutrient uptake, namely, nitrogen (245.30 kg ha⁻¹), phosphorus (105.84 kg ha⁻¹), and potassium (235.33 kg ha⁻¹) than control. It also enhanced economics, namely, net return (US$ 19263 ha⁻¹) and B:C ratio (2.07) and resources use efficiency, namely, nutrient use efficiency (79.5 kg kg⁻¹) and water use efficiency (16.75 kg m⁻³). Correlation and regression models hypothesize that all the variables are positively correlated with yield at p < .05 and growth variables like nutrient uptake contribute to the fruit yield individually and together increased fruit yield by 97.3% (r² = 0.973). These results demonstrate that a higher yield is linked to higher nutrient uptake.

KEYWORDS:

• Balanced nutrition
• capsicum
• correlation
• fertigation
• nutrient uptake
• regression

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the All India Coordinated Research Project for Dryland agriculture and ICAR-CAAST Program on Next Generation Technologies in Adaptive Agriculture funded by World Bank.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00103624.2023.2211608

Authors’ contribution statements

SNN, MNT, and Mudalagiriyappa planned the research work and executed the field research, BGV assisted in soil and plant analysis, whereas TS assisted in statistical analysis and manuscript preparation and HSS conceived the idea and supervised the work.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.