Research progress on the mechanism of improving peanut yield by single-seed precision sowing

Abstract

The contradiction between the supply and demand of edible vegetable oil in China is prominent, and the self-sufficiency rate is less than 35%. Peanut has a very outstanding status in ensuring the security of edible oil and food. The emphasis of increasing peanut yield should be the improvement of pod yield per unit area, because the total yield of peanut has not increased as required. This is attributed to mainly two factors — low increase in the crop productivity and the competition for land for grain and cotton crops. For traditional double-seed sowing pattern, it is difficult to further increase the peanut yield due to the serious contradiction between populations and individuals and the declining population quality under high-yield conditions. Single-seed precision sowing was proven to be a new way to increase the economic coefficient (economic yield/biological yield) with the basic stability of the total biomass, which could make plants distribute evenly, reduce the competition among individuals and attain the full production potential of single plant. In order to reveal the mechanism of increasing peanut yield by single-seed precision sowing, the effects on the ontogenetic development (plant character, physiological characteristic and nutrient utilization) and population structure (population uniformity and photosynthesis, source-sink relationship and yield composition) were systematically expounded. This study reports establishment of the high-yield cultivation technology system with the key technology of single-seed precision sowing and the supporting technology of fertilizing and management. We anticipate its wider application for the improvement of peanut yield.

Keywords

• peanut
• single-seed precision sowing
• ontogenetic development
• population structure
• yield-increasing mechanism
• key technology