Author(s): M. S. DINESHA, S. BHASKAR AND C. A. SRINIVASAMURTHY

Abstract: In many industries related to food and allied industries like sugar mill and distilleries, the waste waters rich in organic load and plant nutrients are amicable for use as irrigation water. However, one has to evaluate the beneficial effects of using such effluents for irrigation on various components of ecosystem before suggesting its use in agriculture. Adopting the recycling strategy of industrial effluents, treated sugar mill effluent was used in field experiment to investigate its effect on growth and yield of rice under rice-cowpea cropping sequence. The experiment was conducted at Research and Development Farm, M/s. Sri Chamundeshwari Sugars Ltd. Mandya District, Karnataka, India during 2012-14. The experiment was conducted in puddle Kharif rice and during summer season cowpea was taken to study the residual effect of sugar mill effluent applied to rice. The results revealed that continuous treated sugar mill effluent irrigation along with RDF produced significantly superior growth parameters viz., tall plants (85.7 cm), more number of tillers hill-1 (25.1) and total dry matter production hill-1 (115.4 g) at harvest. It also recorded significantly higher yield parameters viz., number of panicles hill-1 (13.2), panicle length (24.1cm) and number of grains per panicle (187.4) all of which contributed significantly higher grain yield (53.8 q ha-1) and straw yield (61.1 q ha-1) as compared to control. Subsequently, residual effect of the same treatment recorded higher seed yield and haulm yield (996 and 3113 kg ha-1, respectively) in cowpea crop. Thus it can be concluded that higher grain yield of rice without having negative effect on salt sensitive cowpea could be obtained with treated sugar mill effluent irrigation along with recommended dose of fertilizers in rice – cowpea sequence.

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