Yield Response of Groundnuts to the Amount and Timing of Water Application

Abstract

This paper estimates groundnut [peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.)] yield response to water using experimental data from the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). These response functions are combined with historical meteorological data to simulate yield distributions in order to identify risk-efficient genotypes. Although functions commonly used were not effective in modeling the response of groundnuts to water because of groundnuts' ability to accommodate early drought, the translog function, a polynomial in logarithms, works well. The simulated yield distributions for the 22 genotypes studied were quite different. The risk efficient sets contain from four to seven genotypes and can be reduced to only one or two genotypes when a narrow range of risk aversion is specified.