Effect of Varying Temperature by Covered Plastic Film on Growth and Development of Chickpea

Abstract

Background: Climate change has become a major challenge in cultivation of chickpea and productivity. Negative impacts of climate change are likely to result from the effects of high temperature, low temperature, drought and excessive moisture and these factors affect crop yield ultimately. Methods: Keeping in view for quantifying the effects an experiment was laid out in split plot design. The experiment with three dates of sowing i.e. 12th December 2018 (D1), 22nd December 2019 (D2) and 2nd January 2019 (D3) as main plot treatments and the four microclimatic regimes viz. open field (T1), Open roof (T2), perforated roof (T3) and closed or packed (T4) by 100 GSM plastic film as sub plot treatments was laid to analyse the impact of temperature variation. Result: The major finding of the study is that the chickpea crop sown on 12th Dec. (D1) found highest grain yield (1200 kg ha-1) as compared to 22nd Dec. (845 kg ha-1) and 2nd Jan. (638 kg ha-1). This may be mainly attributed to congenial weather during the entire growing period. By studying the role of weather variables on chickpea in terms of seed yield, it is noticed that best performance of Packed subset (T4) i.e. 1044 kg ha-1 was observed in all dates of sowing followed by Perforated (T3) i.e. 955 kg ha-1, Open roof (T2) i.e. 813 kg ha-1 and Open field (T1) i.e. 765 kg ha-1.