Outline

• Introduction

• Objective

• Need for the Project

• Materials and Methods

• Results

• References
 INTRODUCTION
COTTON
 Pakistan is the fourth largest producer after India, china and USA
 Favorite crop in tropical and sub tropical regions
 In Pakistan
o area under cotton = 2917 thousand hectares
o Seed cotton production = 10.074 million bales
o Contribution in GDP = 1% approx.
o Value added in agriculture = 5.1%
o Cotton lint yields went down to a complete failure during the years 2012-15 leading to
consumption of precious foreign exchange for fabric and thread import
(Govt. of Pakistan, 2016)
Objective
 To determine the quantitative impact of sowing date on growth and yield
of Bt. cotton under agro-ecological condition of Multan
 To determine the model based comparative performance of different Bt.
cultivars in semi arid environment for seed cotton yield
 To evaluate CROPGRO-Cotton Model for comparison between observed
and simulated seed cotton yield performance with in Bt. cultivars and
between Bt. and non-Bt. cultivars of cotton under Multan conditions
 To develop recommendation on basis of simulated model comparison
with observed yield statistics for right time sowing of Bt. cultivars in and
similar climatic regions of Multan
 Need for the Project
 Cotton is one of the four cash crops of Pakistan that fulfills fiber need of 190 million people
(Govt. of Pakistan, 2016)
 Sowing time and plant spacing are the vital agronomic practices to get the maximum seed
cotton yield (Ali et al., 2007)

 Plant height and fiber quality of cotton are among vulnerable factors under varying sowing
time
(Awan et al.,2011)
 Early and late sowing increased crop susceptibility to different diseases such as cotton leaf curl
virus, root rot of cotton etc. (Ghanzanfar et al., 2007)

 Early sowing of cotton not only let it overlap with other crops at their peak vegetative or
reproductive stage such as wheat and maize and allows biological disease and pest load to shift
to nascent cotton crop (Rauf et al., 2006)
 Need for the Project
 Moreover, early sown cotton becomes exposed to heat stress at its
reproductive stage leading to retarded floral bud, desiccation of flowers
and obstructed boll formation
(Lobel & Asner, 2003; Salvucci & Crafts-brandner, 2004)
 Under Pakistani conditions, late sown cotton most probably face torrential
rainfall at its reproductive phase hence, vegetative growth triggers due to
indeterminate growth behavior and source sink relationship becomes
affected by switching off the ongoing reproductive development
(Taha et al., 1996)
 In addition, climatic variability in terms of uneven rainfall severely
hamper cotton growth and development especially at reproductive phase
resulting in flower and boll drop (Reddy et al.,
 Bt. cotton crop failure in the near past due to lack of recommendation for appropriate planting
time emphasizes for optimization of sowing time in the regions of low rainfall of Punjab
province

 Decision Support System for Agro-technology Transfer (DSSAT) is a crop management based
software package including models for simulating 25 different crops in which CROPGRO-
Cotton model is used for cotton (Jones et al., 2003; Hoogenboom et al., 2004)

Hence, the subject research was designed for simulating the effect of sowing date on growth and
yield of Bt-cotton under Multan conditions