Abstract
The interest in organic grown cereals has increased the need for variety tests under organic growing systems and/or the knowledge on whether growth characteristics describe yield differently under conventional and organic conditions. This paper is a contribution to that question by examining the relationships between some important growth characteristics in barley trials in both systems in Northern Sweden and in Denmark. Mixed model analyses were used for regressions of growth characteristics (or transformations of those) on yield (and log-transformed yield), allowing the slope to depend on the growing system. The analyses showed that diseases seemed to have a less negative effect on yield in the organic growing system than in the conventional growing system if pesticides were not applied. For other characteristics the effect depended on the country. This was the case for grain characteristics where the effect of volume weight in the Swedish trials was much larger in the conventional growing system than in the organic growing system, while a non-significant difference in the opposite direction was found for the trails from Denmark. For the trials from Denmark the effect of grain weight was much larger in the organic growing system than in the conventional growing system, but there was only a small and non-significant difference in the Swedish trials. In both countries there was a significant interaction between the two grain characteristics.
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Acknowledgements
This work was initialised by the cooperation in the EU cost-action 860, “Sustainable low-input cereal production: required varietal characteristics and crop diversity (SUSVAR)” and we would like to thank members of working groups number 2 on Biostatistics and number 6 on Variety Testing & Certifications for valuable comments and discussions on earlier versions of this paper. The authors would also like to thank the referees for valuable comments on a previous version of this paper.
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Kristensen, K., Ericson, L. Importance of growth characteristics for yield of barley in different growing systems: will growth characteristics describe yield differently in different growing systems?. Euphytica 163, 367–380 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10681-008-9713-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10681-008-9713-6