Res. on Crops 21 (4) : 712-718 (2020) DOI : 10.31830/2348-7542.2020.

112
With seven figures
Printed in India
Assessing the effectiveness of drip irrigation combined with
agricultural mulches on the performance of tomato
(Lycopersicon esculentum) under water constraint
conditions of Lam Dong Province, Vietnam
T. A. DANG1,2,*
1
University of Science
227 Nguyen Van Cu Str., 5 Dist., Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
*(e-mail: dtan@hcmus.edu.vn)

(Received : October 20, 2020/Accepted : December 28, 2020)

ABSTRACT

The present investigation was undertaken during the spring crop (January to
June 2019) at greenhouse in the Don Duong cultivation farm, Lam Dong province, Vietnam
to evaluate the effect of drip irrigation combined with agricultural mulches on RITA tomato.
The study is conducted applying agricultural mulches in greenhouse (AMG) with irrigation
water level (IWL) 80% of actual evapotranspiration (ETa) and no agricultural mulches
outside greenhouse (AMO) with IWL 100% of ETa to plant tomatoes cuttings. Based on the
findings, highest tomato yield obtained for AMG was 81.6 ton/ha while for AMO was 67.8
ton/ha. The highest income for AMO case was US$ 4559/ha while for AMG case achieved
up to US$ 7658/ha. The study, therefore, demonstrated the effect of the drip irrigation
combined with agricultural mulches compared to the agricultural un-mulches case.

Key words : Agricultural mulch, drip irrigation, greenhouse, irrigation management, tomato,
yield

INTRODUCTION demonstrated through practical applications

Save water irrigation is considered as
an important factor of modern agriculture in
the context of scarce water resources due to
increasing demand for water (Biswas et al.
2015; Yahyaoui et al., 2017) and climate change
(Sharma et al., 2015; Yahyaoui et al., 2017).
Among various irrigation methods being used
widely in the world, drip irrigation has proven
its superiority compared to traditional methods
such as straw, plastic film, grass, hyacinth
because of reducing irrigation water application
as well as contributing to the increase in
production (Monte et al., 2013; Tesfay et al.,
2019) and it is, therefore, has interested the
attention of farmers in many parts of the world
(Luvai et al., 2014; Mulatu et al., 2019; Lee
and Dang, 2020). An advantage of the drip
irrigation method is that water is provided at
the minimum amount but crop yields remain
optimal (Sharma et al., 2015; Yahyaoui et al.,
2017; Parameshwarareddy et al., 2018). The
effect of water-saving irrigation method is
(Francaviglia and Bene, 2019) and it has
attracted the attention of researchers around
the world (Lee and Dang, 2019). Sharma et al.
(2015) conducted a study on the effect of drip-
irrigated system on tomato grown in the CTAE
farm in Rajasthan of India. Their results carried
out that the optimum irrigation requirement
for the tomato is only around 80% of ETc.
Parameshwarareddy et al. (2018) investigated
the drip irrigation levels for tomato planted in
the greenhouse at the Saidapur farm reported
that the tomato yield reach 126.7 ton/ha at
IWL 100% of ETc. In recent years, the method
of drip irrigation combined with agricultural
mulches are considered as an effective solution
in saving irrigation water (Luvai et al., 2014;
Biswas et al., 2015), improving crop
productivity (Monte et al., 2013) as well as
reducing production costs (Yahyaoui et al.,
2017), which is being widely applied in many
parts of the world (Francaviglia and Bene,
2019), especially in areas where scarce
irrigation water (Yahyaoui et al., 2017;

2
Vietnam National University-HCM City, Vietnam.
 Effect of drip irrigation combined with agricultural mulches on tomato
Francaviglia and Bene, 2019). Hence, this study
was undertaken to evaluate the effect of drip
irrigation combined with or without agricultural
mulches for Don Duong tomato cultivation farm
in Lam Dong province of Vietnam.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Experimental Site
The experiment was conducted in the
Don Duong experimental farm (11°41′24′′-
11o41′50′′N and 108°33′48′′-108°37′21′′E, 1500
m above sea-level) in Lam Dong province of
Vietnam (Fig. 1). The climate condition at the
study area is tropical monsoon with mean
temperature about 21.5°C and average
humidity up to 86% based on annual sunshine
reach approximately 2500 hrs. The main soil
components analyzed including 57.8% sand,
30.4% silt, and 11.8% clay with the soil water
content at saturation 38 vol%, field capacity
Fig. 1. Location of the study area.
Fig. 2. Illustration of the experimental farm with a) Agricultural mulch punched holes and b)
Agricultural un-mulch.
713
15 vol%, permanent wilting point 7.0 vol% and
saturated hydraulic conductivity 2200 mm/
day.
Experimental Design
The experimental was designed 2800 m2
wide and planted 50,000 tomato cuttings. An
irrigation system was established consisting of
a 5000 L tank which was placed at 2.0 m high
compared to the ground surface, screen filter,
main, sub-mains, control valves with the drip
pipelines and other accessories required for
providing irrigation water. A study on irrigation
efficiency for tomatoes planted in greenhouses
in Lam Dong province of Vietnam by Lee et al.
(2020) reported that highest tomato yield
recorded when IWL 80% of ETc was applied.
Monte et al. (2013) stated that tomato yield
obtained with IWL 80% of ETc was higher other
irrigation levels. In this work, slight deficit
irrigation 80% of ETc was, therefore, applied.
Recommended fertilizer rates for tomatoes were
applied including 100 kg/ha N, 80 kg/ha P and
80 kg/ha K. The RITA tomato cuttings 20 days
old were planted with the row spacing was 1.2
m and each tomato cutting was 0.4 m during
the period from January 6 to May 5 of planting
crop season 2019. For mulching case, an
agricultural mulch punched holes of 40 mm
diameter was covered over the ground surface
and tomato cuttings were planted on the
punched holes (Fig. 2).
Determination of Irrigation Water
Requirement (IWR)
The crop model namely AquaCrop was
used to define IWR for planting tomato crop.
714 Dang

In the AquaCrop model, the actual
evapotranspiration (ETa) is calculated through
reference evapotranspiration (ETo). The
Penman-Monteith formula is selected to define
ETo (Silvestro et al., 2017; Tesfay et al., 2019)
and ETo is defined using daily meteorological
data such as air temperature, relative humidity,
wind speed and sunshine hours (Khov et al.,
2017; Lee and Dang, 2019). Reference
evapotranspiration (ETo) is defined as follow:
(Eq. 1)
Where, Rn is the net radiation above ground
surface (MJ/m2/day);
transpiration via water use efficiency based the
amount of transpired water (Khov et al., 2017;
Lee and Dang, 2019). The cumulative
aboveground biomass production is given by:
(Eq. 3)
Where, Bi is cumulative aboveground biomass
(kg/ha), Tri is the daily crop transpiration (mm),
EToi is the daily reference evapotranspiration
(mm) and WP* is the is the normalized biomass
water productivity in g.m-2.
The crop yield (CY) is determined based
on the cumulative aboveground biomass
production and harvest index (HI). CY is defined
as follows:

G is a soil heat flux density (MJ/m2/day) Cy = Bi ∗ Hi (Eq. 4)

T is the daily temperature (oC)
u2 is wind speed at 2.0 m height (m/s)
es is the saturation vapor pressure (kPa)
ea is the actual vapor pressure (kPa)
∆ is the slope of the vapor pressure curve (kPa/oC)
γ is psychrometric constant (kPa/oC)
In the AquaCrop model, IWR was
commonly defined based on the variation of
water depth after minus ETa. ETa was defined
by multiplying the ETo with crop coefficient (Kc)
for different growth stages (Table 1).
ETa is calculated as follow:
ETa = Kc × ETo (Eq. 2)
In the Eq. 2, ETo is calculated by mm/
day and Kc represents the coefficient of
cultivation corresponding to the development
stages of tomato.
Determination of Biomass and Fruit Yield
In the AquaCrop model, the biomass B
was calculated directly from the crop
Table 1. Estimated irrigation water requirement for different growth stages of tomatoes planted with AMG and AMO
treatments
Where, CY is the crop yield in kg/ha; Bi is
cumulative aboveground biomass (kg/ha)
Determination of Crop Characteristics
To define crop growth rate (CGR) of
planting crop over time, a polynomial
expression was used to monitor the CGR (Monte
et al., 2013). CGR was considered as a
physiological variable that assesses the
quantity of phyto-mass accumulated per unit
of the area during crop transplanting period.
CGR was defined based on the derivative to
the adjusted expression of dry matter curve per
unit of surface area with time in a unit grams
per square meter of ground surface per day
(Addai and Alimiyawo, 2015). Polynomial
expression was established by:
Y = e(a+bx+cx2) (Eq. 5)
Where, Y is the value of the variable and it is
defined base on total dry matter and area of
the leaf; x is the day after transplanting while

Crop stages Duration Kc Agricultural mulches Outside without

(day) in greenhouse agricultural mulches

ETo ETa ETo ETa

(mm/stage) (mm/stage) (mm/stage) (mm/stage)

Initial 20 0.52 50.2 57.8 51.8 59.6

Development 30 0.79 83.4 90.3 82.5 99.9
Mid-season 40 1.09 126.4 141.6 130.8 146.8
Late-season 30 0.90 123.6 102.9 127.6 115.9
 Effect of drip irrigation combined with agricultural mulches on tomato 715

a, b, and c are the constants to adjust the
second-degree polynomial.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Model Performance Assessment
The performance of the proposed model
was assessed based on the comparison between
observed and simulated results of canopy cover,
biomass and fruit yield during the crop planting
period. The simulated results of canopy cover
pointed out a good performance of the applied
model with R2 up to 0.95 and 0.91, respectively
for tomatoes planted with AMG case (Fig. 3a)
and AMO case (Fig. 3b).
The performance of the AquaCrop model
was conducted through observed and simulated
biomass and fruit yield of tomato in the crop
season of 2019. The analyzed results showed a
slight difference (R2 = 0.81) between observed
and simulated biomass of tomatoes planted in
the AMG case while a higher difference (R2 =
0.69) was also recorded for tomatoes planted
in the AMO case (Fig. 4a). The main cause for
this difference of the AMO case may be created
by tomatoes panted outside without
agricultural mulches and it is, therefore, very
difficult to control the unpredictable change of
weather factors such as temperature and
rainfall, leading to the accuracy of the
simulated model is not high. For tomato yield,
the simulated results closely approached the
observed data for both AMO case and AMG case
(Fig. 4b). Specifically, the relevance between
simulation results and observation data for the
AMO case was R2 = 0.83 and the AMG case
was R 2 = 0.85, respectively. Based on the

Fig. 3. Comparison between observed and simulated canopy cover of tomatoes planted a) without agricultural
mulches and (b) with agricultural mulches.

Fig. 4. Observed and simulated results of a) dry biomass and b) fruit yield of tomato for mulching and no
agricultural mulches outside greenhouse.
716
findings of canopy cover, biomass and fruit
yield, it can be affirmed that the proposed model
was appropriate to simulate the characteristics
of tomato in the study area.
Evaluation of Leaf Area Index (LAI)
Observed results of LAI for tomatoes
planted with AMG and AMO are illustrated in
Fig. 5. In the initial and first half of growth
stage (from 0th to 40th day after transplanting,
LAI was slightly increased with the values
varied from 0.0 to 0.25. In the late half of the
growth and development stages (from 40th to
90th days after transplanting), LAI began to
increase rapidly and reached the maximum
values with 1.09 and 1.23, respectively on the
90th days after transplanting for AMO and AMG
cases. In the late stage (from 90th to 115th days
after transplanting), LAI is decreased rapidly
and reached the minimum values were 0.67
and 0.85, respectively on the 113th days after
transplanting for AMO and AMG cases. In
general, tomatoes are planted in the AMG have
higher LAI than the AMO during the period from
40th to 90th days after transplanting.
Fig. 5. The leaf area index of tomatoes planted with
agricultural mulches in greenhouse and no
agricultural mulches outside greenhouse.
Evaluation of Crop Growth Rate (CGR)
The observed results of the CGR of
tomatoes planted with AMG and AMO are
presented in Fig. 6. In the initial and first half
of the growth stage, a slight increase with the
values of CGR varied from 0.0 to 2.8 g/m2/day.
In the late half of the growth and development
stages, an increasing trend of CGR for both AMG
and AMO recorded with the values increased in
2.0 to 9.4 g/m2/day for AMO case and 2.8 to
10.1 g/m2/day for AMG case. A difference
between AMG and AMO was recorded for the
Dang
late half of the growth and development stages
if the maximum value of CGR for AMO case
appeared in the 85th day after transplanting,
AMG recorded in the 95 th day after
transplanting. The main reason can be explained
this difference is that the tomatoes planted in
the AMG case has grown and developed grows
better than the AMO case. In the late stage, CGR
is slowly decreased and dropped the minimum
values (-4.3 and -3.6 g/m2/day) for both AMO
case and AMG case. In general, tomatoes are
planted in the AMG have higher LAI than the
AMO during the period from 40th to 90th days
after transplanting. These observed results are
consistent with a study previously published by
Monte et al. (2013) that a decreasing trend of
CGR of tomato will be appeared from 90th to 115th
day after transplanting.
Fig. 6. The crop growth rate of tomatoes planted with
agricultural mulches in the greenhouse and
no agricultural mulches.
Investigation of Tomato Height (TH)
The observed results of TH at different
growth stages (from 10th to 80 th days after
transplanting) for un-mulch and mulch cases
are illustrated in Fig. 7. Results carried out
that tomato cuttings grew with their height
were increasing gradually from the 10th to 80th
day after transplanting. Then, the growth
process of tomato height stopped for both with
and without mulch. Monte et al. (2013) also
reported a similar result for the growth process
of tomato planted in Seropedica, RJ, Brazil.
Maximum height of observed tomato can be
reached 1.65 m and 2.05 m, respectively for
un-mulch and mulch cases on the 80th days
after transplanting. However, tomato planted
in the mulch case is higher compared to the
un-mulch case at all growth stages.
 Effect of drip irrigation combined with agricultural mulches on tomato
Fig. 7. Tomato height from transplanting to harvest
for mulch and un-mulch cases.
Economic Efficiency Analysis
The measured results of fruit tomato
weight planted with AMG and AMO are
presented in Table 2. Results pointed out that
tomatoes planted with AMG case, the number
of tomato fruits reached up to 76 while the
corresponding tomato fruits recorded 64 for
AMO case. Average, maximum, and minimum
fruit weight were 69.8, 79.4 and 48.9 g,
respectively for AMG case (Table 2) while the
corresponding values of AMO case only
obtained 62.6, 71.8 and 47.5 g, respectively
for AMO.
Table 2. Measured results of number and weight of fruit
tomatoes for AMG and AMO cases
Planted Number Fruit Fruit tomato weight (g)
methods of fruit yield
tomatoes (t/ha) Average Maximum Minimum
AMG 76 81.6 69.8 79.4 48.9
AMO 64 67.8 62.6 71.8 47.5
AMG : Agricultural mulches in greenhouse and AMO: no
agricultural mulches outside greenhouse.
In case of AMO with IWL 100% of ETa,
the benefit can be only earned US$ 4559/ha
while AMG case with IWL 80% of ETa
corresponding benefit earned up to US$ 8058/
ha. The main cause of low benefit of the AMO
treatment was due to the higher cost grown by
AMG treatment. Mulches had a significant
positive effect on LAI, CGR, height, weight and
fruit yield of tomato compared without mulch
treatment. Drip irrigation with AMG treatment
obtained 21.3, 22.1 and 8.6%, respectively
higher LAI, CGR, height, weight and fruit yield
of tomato compared to drip irrigation with AMO
treatment. Beneficial of tomato crop irrigated
using drip irrigation with AMG treatment has
717
been previously reported Biswas et al. (2015).
The main reason may be caused by agricultural
mulches reduced the rate of irrigation water
loss due to evaporation from soil surface while
the rate of water loss from soil surface due to
evaporation in the AMO treatment was much
higher in the AMG treatment. A study on the
effect of drip irrigation and agricultural
mulching on tomato yield in the experimental
field of Bangladesh Agricultural Research
Institute by Biswas et al. (2015) reported that
the application of agricultural mulch combined
with drip irrigation method is an optimal
solution not only irrigation water save but also
improve crop yield. Similarly, high water use
efficiency was confirmed through AMG
treatment only with 80% of crop water demand.
CONCLUSION
Drip irrigation with irrigation water level
80% of ETa combined with agricultural
mulches under greenhouse condition can
enhance the weight and fruit yield of tomato
compared to irrigation water level 100% of ETa
without mulching. The results of this work can
be useful to choose the most effective
cultivation method, contribute to reducing
production costs with increased crop yields.
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