Nitrogen fertilization effect on biomass yield of six different sorghum bicolor varieties

Abstract

Sorghum belongs to the Poaceae family and it is used for its high biomass production. A field experiment was conducted using a factorial split-plot design with three replicates and twenty-four plots per replication. The main factor was the different varieties (V1: Buffalo grain, V2: Elite, V3: Big Kahuna, V4: 25K1009, V5: 4264 and V6: 5D61) and the sub-factor the different nitrogen fertilization levels (N1: 0, N2: 80, N3: 160 and N4: 240 kg ha-1, using urinary ammonia 40-0-0). In the case of fresh biomass weight, the variety "25K1009" produced the higher yield, followed by "Big Kahuna" and "Elite" with 66.9, 65.27 and 63.03 t ha-1 respectively, which are statistically significantly higher compared to the yield produced from the other three varieties. The same was also found in the case of the dry biomass weight. The increase in the fresh biomass weight was higher between the higher n-application (160 and 240 kg N ha-1) reaching the 9 t ha-1. Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).