Development of Agronomic Practices for Chickpea Production in Alberta
Chickpea production information has not been developed for Alberta. Information on cultivar performance, inoculation, seeding rates, seeding dates, and fertilizer recommendations will be developed.
IPNI-2000-CAN-AB20
18 Feb 2003
2002 Annual Interpretive Summary
Development of Agronomic Practices for Chickpea Production in Alberta, 2002
In western Canada, the chickpea production area expanded rapidly in the years 1998 through 2001. However, the drought and adverse harvesting conditions in the fall of 2001 saw the acreage of chickpea drop by 50% in 2002, down to approximately 600,000 acres. The objective of this study is to evaluate two types of chickpeas under varying management treatments in order to develop agronomic production practices for southern Alberta. Experiments evaluated chickpea response to variety, inoculant, nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), sulfate-sulfur (SO42--S), seeding date, and seeding rate.
While severe drought conditions limited chickpea yields in 2000 and 2001, good yields were harvested at most of the seven trial locations in 2002. However, N was the only added nutrient that had any impact on chickpea yields in 2002, with inoculation also having only limited effects. In the past three years, no significant (P = 0.05) grain yield responses to fertilizer P were recorded at any of the 19 field trials conducted. While soil test P was medium to high in 12 of the test sites, seven of 19 trials had soil test P of less than 27 lb P/A, a level below which consistent field pea responses were recorded in previous research in this region. These results indicate that the chickpea crop is much more efficient than field peas in taking up soil P. Chickpea seed is not as high in P as field peas, removing approximately 0.36 lb P2O5/bu. However, with the yields reaching as high as 60 bu/A in this study, significant removal of soil P occurs when growing the crop. Growers will have to take this into consideration if they wish to prevent soil P depletion when including the crop in rotation. AB-20F