Effect of seed rate on yield performance of dry direct seeded winter rice

Seedling transplanting on puddled soil is the conventional and most popular method of rice establishment but water scarcity is posing a serious threat to this system of rice cultivation in boro season. Dry direct seeding (DDS) is an alternative rice establishment technology which helps cultivation of rice using 50-70% less irrigation water. Sowing of seeds at 25 cm x 15 cm spacing allocating 4-5 seeds hill-1 by hand is considered as the best practice for dry seeding. Hand sowing is laborious, tedious and expensive and therefore hand sowing would not be feasible as the labour unavailability and wage rate has been increased manifolds in the country. Therefore, there is need of evaluating the yield performance of line sown dry seeded rice at various seeding rates to standardize seed rate for the machine sowing. Two mega rice varieties for winter (boro) season viz. BRRI dhan28 and BRRI dhan29 were cultivated at five seeding rates from 30 to 70 kg ha-1 and also spaced seeding at 25 cm x 15 cm using 30 kg seed ha-1 as control. The result reveals that among the seeding rates the highest yield was obtained from 50 kg seed ha-1 but this was significantly lower than that obtained from 25 cm x 15 cm spacing with 30 kg seed ha-1. Therefore, considering both the yield and labour cost, dry direct seeding could be practiced with continuous seeding at 25 cm apart rows using 50 kg seed ha-1.