Assessment of Cob Characteristics of Sweet Corn on Sandy Soils under Different Irrigation Methods

Drip irrigation is an incredibly efficient watering method that slowly delivers water directly to a plants root system, through a network of small pipes. This minimizes conventional losses such as deep percolation, runoff and soil erosion. A few low cost automation systems were developed and evaluated their performance with drip irrigation on sweet corn. Compared to flood irrigation and paired row drip irrigation, single row drip irrigation produced better results. The results indicated that the number of kernel rows per cob, number of kernels per cob, length and diameter of the cob and individual fresh cob weight were observed to be more in single row as compared to flood irrigation and paired row drip irrigation systems. The yield response was also observed to be best in soil moisture sensor based irrigation with single row spacing.