The Response of Dry Bean to Water Stress at Various Growth Cycles in a Semi-Arid Region

Poor irrigation management is resulted from some reasons such as lack of information relevant to the crop water use. That kind of information is necessarily prerequisites for both planners and producers to obtain irrigation program to minimize the yield losses under water stress conditions. A two-year, 2013-2014 growing season, field experiment was performed to determine the response of dry bean to the water deficiency in different growth stages at Konya plain of Turkey. The study was organized as randomized complete block design with three replications. Vegetative (V), reproductive (R), and pod filling-maturation (P) three plant growth cycles as were examined with including rain-fed total eight irrigation treatments were researched. A 100% crop water requirement (VRP) was considered full-irrigation treatment. Irrigation was not performed during vegetative, reproductive, and pod filling-maturation cycles or during a combination of those stages in other treatments. In results, depending on the irrigation treatments, actual evapotranspiration (ETa) for 2013 and 2014 varied from 104 to 544 mm and from 110 to 558 mm, respectively. The average crop coefficients (Kc) among the years were 0.75 for vegetative, 1.01 for reproductive, and 0.82 for pod filling-maturation stages. Depending on irrigation time, as decreasing the irrigation water resulted reducing seed yield. It was obvious that higher seed yield as well as yield components obtained full irrigation at entire growing season, which was preferable. An alternative to full irrigation in whole growth stages particularly in areas with insufficient water resources, performing full irrigation till initial of the filling-maturation cycle and then ending irrigation can be highly recommended as ideal, as it resulted water saving of 38%, and rise 27% in irrigation water use efficiency (IWUE) as well as 20% seed yield loss by comparison to full irrigation.