Deficit irrigation based on drought tolerance in tomato varieties

Abstract

Water scarcity is becoming more and more serious due to global warming or rise in temperatures and reduction in the amount of rainfall. Proper management of water resources is a need especially in the agricultural sector, simply because without water for irrigation farmers cannot achieve a production that satisfies the needs of the continuously increasing population. Due to this fact researchers and scientists hold a big responsibility to plan and set out new strategies and techniques to reduce the impact of this problem on agricultural production. A new study was conducted in 2011 on tomatoes to test an established theory that deals with water scarcity; the study had the following objectives: First to evaluate the effect of regular deficit irrigation using different water application levels 30, 60, and 100percent of actual evapotranspiration Etc on tomato yield of different varieties, second to select drought resistant varieties from 23 different tomato cultivars and the last objective is to evaluate the water use efficiency and water productivity under each irrigation treatment. Data were collected using three selected plants from a total of five plants from each variety; data included the average fruit weight, average fruit number, number of clusters and number of fruits per cluster. Results regarding yield showed that there was a significant difference between the 30 and 60percent irrigation treatments and between the 30 and 100percent irrigation treatment, but no significant difference was present between the 60 and 100percent irrigation treatment. There was no interaction between varieties and irrigation treatments. Three varieties 5, 19 and 16 showed superiority under net house and-or open field conditions.