Optimizing Nitrogen Options for Improving Nitrogen Use Efficiency of Rice under Different Water Regimes

Major challenge in rice production is to achieve the goal of enhancing both food production and fertilizer use efficiency. Rice growth simulation model, ORYZA (v3) was used in the present study to evaluate the model under continuous flooded (CF) and alternate wetting and drying (AWD) regimes with different fertilizer nitrogen (N) rates with different N splits using a historical data of past 45 years. The model satisfactorily simulated crop biomass and nitrogen uptake at both irrigation regimes and fertilizers N rates and splits. The yield differences among the years were large due to climate change, but enhanced by N rates. The response of N curves was different at both water regimes. At 0 N rate, the slope for agronomic efficiency (AE) was high which tends to decrease with increase in N rates. With the one split basal application of N, lowest yield was found with high physiological efficiencies (PE), lowest fertilizer recoveries (RE) and lowest agronomic efficiency (AE). For both water applications and fertilizer levels, high yield with high nitrogen uptake, AE, RE and partial factor productivity (PFP) were witnessed high at four split (3:3:3:1), while having low physiological efficiency. The water productivity (irrigation + rainfall) WPI+R at basal in one N split for AWD at 150 kg N ha−1 was 1.19 kg m−3 and for CF was 0.82 kg m−3, whereas for 225 kg N ha−1 WPI+R of AWD was 1.50 kg m−3 and 1.14 kg m−3 for CF. In general, AWD exhibited high WPI+R with no rice yield penalty compared to CF. Splitting with the proper amount of fertilizer N resulted in good water productivity and nitrogen efficiencies, could lead to high rice yield