Comparative Study of Biomass Production and Nutrient Uptake of Cold Tolerant and Traditional Maize Hybrids

The new maize hybrids with extremely short growing seasons can provide new opportunities in comparison to the traditional hybrids. One of the most important characteristics of these new hybrids is that they tolerate the cold very well and they can be planted as early as late March and early April in Hungary, when the soil temperature is only 5–6 °C. An advantage of these hybrids, for example, is that the emerging plants can better utilize the available soil moisture in spring and, because of their short growing season, flowering occurs before the July heat, which helps reduce fertility problems. The most valuable characteristic is the perfect integration in the crop rotations. In an average year, these hybrids can be harvested with 20% grain moisture around the third week of August, so it can be an excellent force crop for the autumn-drilled crops. Weather has a great impact on the success of the crop production these days. To minimize the impact of the extremely changeable weather (e.g., rainfall) and provide safer production in maize requires some technological changes in the traditional maize-cultivation practices. This experiment was established in 2010 in Hungary, Zala County, close to the city of Keszthely, in field conditions with a plot size of 0.1 ha in four replications on different maize hybrids in extreme weather conditions. The weight of maize plant biomass, shoot length, and nutrient [nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), calcium (Ca)] concentrations were measured. Comparative evaluation was performed with this data. Our experimental data confirm the early growth of both the cold-tolerant MT Milo and the traditional Kamelias hybrids is rather dynamic. Later, however, the growth rate of the traditional hybrid was greater. Both growth rate and absolute biomass production of the two hybrids differed significantly as well.