Current technologies of increasing the productivity of grain crops in the Eastern part of the Northern Steppe of Ukraine

Abstract

Goal. To determine the efficiency of grain production in the Eastern part of the Northern Steppe of Ukraine through the development of new and improvement of existing technologies for growing winter wheat and spring barley on the basis of biologization and resource conservation. Methods. Hypotheses — to choose the direction of research, determine the relevance of the work and develop a scheme of field experiment; synthesis — to generalize the researches’ results and to form the conclusions; induction — to identify the best options for experiments; mathematical statistics — to determine the significance of the influence of the studied factors, the accuracy of experiments, the correlations between different factors. Results. The research was performed in 2015–2019 in the research field of the Donetsk State Agricultural Research Station of NAAS. The scheme of the experiment provided a comparative description of 3 technologies for growing winter wheat of the variety Bohynia and spring barley of the variety Avers: conventional, organoadaptive and organic. The highest indicators of ear length (9.2 cm), number of grains in the ear (27.8 pieces) and weight of 1000 grains (41 g) were obtained in winter wheat crops using the generally accepted technology. The weight of 1000 grains of spring barley was the largest when using organadaptive and organic cultivation technologies (50.3 g). With the use of conventional technology, this figure decreased by 1.3 g. The highest yield of winter wheat was gained at use of the conventional cultivation technology and amounted to 6.69 t/ha, while for organoadaptive it was 6.59 t/ha. With the use of organic technology, the grain yield of winter wheat was 0.54 t/ha lower than that of organoadaptive and 0.64 t/ha lower compared to the conventional one. It was found that the highest grain yield of spring barley was provided by organoadaptive cultivation technology (3.79 t/ha), while the generally accepted yield decreased by 0.2 t/ha, in organic — by 0.47 t/ha compared to organoadaptive. The level of profitability of growing winter wheat (161.7%) and spring barley (152.9%) was the highest when using organadaptive technology. Conclusions. The use of the proposed organadaptive and organic technologies for growing grain crops on the basis of biologization and resource conservation is effective and relevant in the industrial region of the Eastern part of the Northern Steppe of Ukraine.