Use of shoot reduction treatments as a means of simulating hail injury to proso millet
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Proso millet, Panicum miliaceum (L.), is a warm-season annual grass well adapted for grain production in the western Great Plains of the United States, where risk of hail injury is greater than any other region of the United States. Because adjustment procedures and loss equations are not available, proso millet producers in this region have had limited access to crop hail insurance as a risk management tool. Our research was conducted to assess impact of shoot reduction treatments imposed at different crop growth stages on grain yield loss of proso millet grown under several environments. Our goal was to provide information for development of crop insurance adjustment procedures. We also wanted to determine the impact of shoot reduction on various grain yield components. Treatments consisted of a control and three levels of shoot reduction (33, 66, and 100% of full stand) applied at four growth stages (emergence, 4-leaf, boot, and heading stages). The experiments were conducted at two locations (Akron, CO and Carrington, ND) during 1996 and 1997 to assess treatment impact on relative grain yield (RGY), expressed as percent of control. A significant shoot reduction x growth stage interaction was observed for RGY, indicating yield loss from increasing shoot reduction varied with growth stage. A linear reduction in RGY to increasing levels of shoot reduction was observed for the 4-leaf, boot and heading growth stages, while RGY displayed a segmented linear response to increasing shoot reduction at emergence. Variation in grain yield, induced by shoot reduction treatments, was more consistently correlated with variation in seed number than seed weight.
