Effects of irrigation regimes on seed yield and yield components of chickpea cultivars at two autumn and spring planting seasons in Lorestan province

This study was aimed to investigate the effects of planting season and irrigation regime on six chickpea genotypes in Lorestan province, west of Iran in a randomized complete block split-plot field experiment. The six chickpea varieties (i.e. Arman, Azad, Hashem, ILC-482, Greet and Nourabad) were sown in autumn and spring and were subjected to four irrigation levels (i.e. irrigation after 75, 100 and 150 mm evaporation from a Class-A Pan and non-irrigated) in two separate experiments. Autumn-sown chickpea out-performed the spring-sown chickpea by 55, 7.0, 8.5, 49.0, 44.0 and 5.7% in terms of number of fertile pods/plant, plant height, 100-seed weight, seed yield/plant, dry matter yield, grain yield and harvest index, respectively. Irrigation after 75 (2316 kg/ha), 100 (2121 kg/ha) and 150 mm evaporation (2010 kg/ha) led to 78, 63 and 54% increases in grain yield, respectively. "Greet" (2089 kg/ha) and "Hashem" (1775 kg/ha) produced the highest and lowest seed yields, respectively. It could be concluded that planting Cv."Greet" under the 75 mm level of irrigation at autumn may lead to the greatest grain yield production. Nevertheless, planting the latter genotype at autumn with irrigation after 150 mm evaporation may lead to substantial increase in grain yield, with minimum usage of water.