Effect of Two Tillage Practices on Disease and Grain Quality of Durum Wheat in Tunisia
Marwa Hassine *
University of Carthage, National Agronomic Institute of Tunisia, LR14AGR01, Laboratory of Genetics and Cereal Breeding, Avenue Charles Nicolle 43, 1082 Tunis, Tunisia.
Chahine Karmous
University of Carthage, National Agronomic Institute of Tunisia, LR14AGR01, Laboratory of Genetics and Cereal Breeding, Avenue Charles Nicolle 43, 1082 Tunis, Tunisia.
Olfa Slama-Ayed
University of Carthage, National Agronomic Institute of Tunisia, LR14AGR01, Laboratory of Genetics and Cereal Breeding, Avenue Charles Nicolle 43, 1082 Tunis, Tunisia.
Mouna Guesmi
Regional Field Crops Research Center Beja-Tunisia, Tunisia.
Hajer Slim-Amara
University of Carthage, National Agronomic Institute of Tunisia, LR14AGR01, Laboratory of Genetics and Cereal Breeding, Avenue Charles Nicolle 43, 1082 Tunis, Tunisia.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Conservation Agriculture constitutes a promising sustainable production strategy for the Mediterranean area to improve yield and quality traits for cereal as durum wheat. No-tillage and the conventional tillage are the most used tillage technics by Tunisian farmers. These two practices were studied under rainfed conditions in North-West of Tunisia on three landraces and two improved durum wheat genotypes. The foliar disease and grain quality as test weight (TW), protein content (PC), gluten rate (GR), yellow berry (YB) and water content (WC) were assessed during 2019-2020 cropping season. No tillage system has increased the disease severity of Zymoseptoria tritici, Pyrenophora tritici-repentis and Puccinia striiformis for all tested genotypes. This increase was notable for improved varieties as Karim and Maâli ranging from 33 to 50% compared to 8% in average for landraces. In addition, the different analyzed grain traits increased for the varieties tested but mainly with landraces as Jneh Khotifa, Mahmoudi and Beskri from 3 to 46% under no tillage practices. These results have emphasis the importance of no tillage practice to sustain grain quality. Therefore, further research would be necessary in shaping variability of durum wheat grain quality traits and the incidence of disease under field conditions.
Keywords: Triticum turgidum L. subsp. durum (Desf.), Agronomic practices, fungal disease, landraces, quality parameters