Lowland Rice Yield Responses to Variation in Water Management in a Sudan Savannah Soil of Nigeria.

This study investigates the applicability of reduced water management (alternate wetting and drying AWD) practice alongside continuous flooding (CF) which is the traditional water management practice of lowland rice production in Sudan savanna ecological zone of Nigeria. Rice growth component variables from each of the management practice were compared to identify the best in terms of re- duced number of irrigations, productivity, yield quality and profitability. The study was carried out at the Irrigation field of the Teaching and research farm of Faculty of Agriculture, Federal University Dutse. To achieve the said objective, the research experiment was laid out in a Randomized Complete Block Design RCBD arrangement. Two types of irrigation management; AWD and CF were assigned in the plot. The consequent treatment combinations were replicated 3 times and as such a total of 6 plots each with a dimension of 18m x 3m (54m2) were utilized in the experiment. The individual plots and blocks were separated by a discard of 1m and 2m respectively. Soil samples at 0-20cm depth were col- lected before land preparations from three random spots within each plot, thor- oughly mixed to form composite sample per plots for routine analysis. The result showed that AWD had 55, 15 and 25% increase in yield, percentage filled grains and thousand grains weight relative to CF. In the same vein, other attributes such as Mean number of tillers/hill (65.533), panicles/hill (61.522) and panicle length (30.611) of AWD plots also had an increment of 12, 10 and 40% respectively more than the CF method. These findings, clearly demonstrate that AWD is a promising water management practice that has the potentials of reducing the cost of lowland rice production without necessarily and significantly reducing produc- tivity, yield quality and profitability of the crop.