The possibilities of use of nitrogen harvest index in wheat breeding in term of ecological agriculture

Abstract

The topic of nitrogen wheat nutrition was becoming very actually during last decades of last century because of many reasons: fertilizers price, energetic crises, environmental protection, ecological agriculture. Despite the detrimental impacts, the use of fertilizers (N in particular) in agriculture, together with an improvement in cropping systems, mainly in developed countries, have provided a food supply sufficient for both animal and human consumption. Therefore, the challenge for the next decades, with an expanding world population, will be to develop a highly productive agriculture, whilst at the same time preserving the quality of the environment. A multidisciplinary approach to breeding winter wheat and include physiological indicators of nitrogen nutrition efficiency could help in achieving this goal. Consequently, this paper deals with physiological indicator as nitrogen harvest index, its connection with grain yield, heritability and variance and evaluation of Serbian winter wheat genotypes in term of this indicator. The best values of nitrogen harvest index were registered at KG 165/2, Pobeda and Bujna. Emphasized genotypes, selected as superior in term of this indicator, could be considered as carriers of de desirable traits in terms of wheat breeding theory, improvement of production efficiency, environmental protection and development of ecological agriculture.