Influence of basic soil tillage methods on fresh yield and quality of winter rape cultivars

The development of rational system of basic soil tillage results in formation of sufficiently high crop yields. A two-factor field experiment was carried out to address these issues when cultivating winter rape cultivars on light chestnut soils of the Primorsko-Caspian sub-province of the Republic of Dagestan. VEM (standard), Elvis and Meteor winter rape cultivars were studied in the experiment. The following methods of soil tillage were studied: real tillage (control), subsoil tillage. The research revealed that there was no significant difference in agrophysical indicators between the soil cultivation variants. Data on weed infestation of winter rape fields showed that the number of weeds and their weight increased significantly after subsoil tillage. At the budding stage, the number of weeds increased 2.1-fold compared to the control (real tillage), and the weight of weeds increased 1.88-fold. During flowering stage, these indicators were 2.2 times higher. The maximum yield in all variants of the experiment was formed by Elvis cultivar - 44.9 and 41.4 t/ha, respectively, which is more than VEM (standard) and Meteor cultivars by 20.4 t/ha (7.9 %) and 20.0 t/ha (8.7 %), respectively. The yield of Meteor cultivar in these variants was also high and amounted to 41.6 and 38.1 t/ha, respectively, which was higher by 11.5 and 10.4 % compared with the standard. The greatest increase in the fresh yield was provided by real tillage. On average, the yield increased by 8.7 % for varieties in comparison with subsoil cultivation. Elvis cultivar formed the best quality indicators, followed by Meteor cultivar.