Chickpeas Need Stress to Set Seed

REGINA - Sep 26/05 - SNS -- The fact chickpeas will keep growing as long as there are nutrients and enough moisture in the soil makes them harder to grow in areas such as Saskatchewan, where there are a limited number of warm days available for crops to mature.

This has inspired Yantai Gan, a Researcher at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada’s Research Facility in Swift Current, to look for ways growers can introduce stress into fields in order to convince plants to reach maturity before weather becomes an issue for harvesting plants.

"It is a long-season crop," explains Gan, "which is not a problem during a normal year but can lead to maturity challenges in wet years, when the plant might delay setting pods until it is too late."

Because of this growth habit, chickpea is best adapted to the Brown and Dark Brown soil zones of Saskatchewan, where late fall stressful conditions (such as drought) will actually help chickpea plants to shut down their growth and be forced to mature.

Chickpea is not well adapted to saline soils, or to high moisture areas of the province. It is not well suited to areas where soils are slow to warm in the spring, and chickpea do not tolerate wet or waterlogged soils.

Gan and his colleagues have been working on inducing the kind of stress in the plant that would encourage seed set and hasten maturity.

"We know that nitrogen stress can be effective. When ready-to-use nitrogen and soil water are available in the early stages of crop development, the plants will develop a more vigorous vegetative growth, which not only allows plants to accumulate larger amounts of biomass, but also helps plants to deplete soil nutrients and water earlier in the season, promoting more timely maturity," says Gan.

"In an experiment being conducted at Shaunavon and Swift Current, we are comparing the use of nitrogen fertilizer with the use of rhizobial inoculants as a way to bring about maturity or manage it within the parameters of the Saskatchewan growing season. Based on the results from 2004 field trials, the use of nitrogen fertilizer at the rates of 28 to 56 pounds of nitrogen per acre promoted chickpea maturity by as much as 14 to 21 days, compared to the plots that did not receive nitrogen fertilizer."

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