Abstract
Improving crop water productivity of vegetable crops under the environmental control of greenhouses conditions is one of the main problems facing the crop production in the hot climate of Sudan. Two experiments were carried out at the Faculty of Agriculture, University of Khartoum, Shambat, Sudan during the two seasons (2009/2010) with the objective of enhancing crop water productivity of tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum) under controlled environment of greenhouse and open field conditions. Five tomato cultivars imported from the National Agricultural Research Centre (Egypt) namely; Bashair 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 and two varieties Po262 and Po265 from Sudan. Greenhouse was monitored and adopted to avoid overheating air temperature inside the greenhouse. The parameters tested were irrigation efficiency (%), crop water requirements (mm/day), crop productivity (kg/m 2 ) and water productivity (kg/m 3 ). SAS Statistical Package was used to analyze the data, while the variations among the means were checked by LSD. The results showed that crop water productivity significantly (P ?? 0.05) increased under greenhouse conditions (9.3kg/m 2 – 19.8 kg/m 3 ) as compared to open field conditions (3.1kg/m 2 – 4.2 kg/m 3 ) in both seasons. The increases percentage of crop water productivity reached up to 63% as compared to open field conditions. It is recommended that, greenhouses should be monitored and adopted to control the environmental impact inside greenhouse which leads to increase the crop water productivity.
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