Evaluación de aplicaciones foliares de calcio, magnesio, zinc y boro en el cultivo del banano

Abstract

The present work was developed in areas of the Santa Inés farm located in the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences belonging to the Technical University of Machala and its objective was to evaluate the effect of foliar fertilizers (Ca, B, Mg, Zn) by measuring growth variables of the banana crop, clone Williams, in order to assess the effect on the growth and development of the crop. The banana (Musa x paradisiaca L.) is a perennial crop whose fruit is highly marketed and demanded worldwide, since it has nutritional and mineral components in its pulp, which makes it widely used as a staple food. The banana crop is one of the most important economic sectors in Ecuador, covering more than a third of the world's banana exports historically. It has proven to have a competitive advantage in production, standing out for having a high quality fruit and exquisite flavor, which is why the country has become the largest exporter worldwide. Due to the low fertility of some soils it is not possible to obtain adequate growth and yields. Foliar fertilizers are important due to their easy absorption and allow us to correct nutritional deficiencies quickly and efficiently. The experimental design used was a completely randomized block design with 4 treatments and 3 replications, each treatment as follows: T1, concentrated suspensions, composed of 20cc. Calctrac, Bortrac, Zintrac, Magtrac + 1.5 l. Water; T2, chelated, (20cc Fertiquel (Ca, B, Zn, Mg) + 1.5 l. Water); T3 (20cc Banatrel + 1.5 l. Water) and T4 control. The variables evaluated were: leaf emission (EF) number of leaves emitted weekly, leaf area (AF) the third youngest leaf was evaluated, height of the mother plant (AM) measured from the base to the third youngest leaf, height of the daughter plant (AH), stem of the mother plant (FM), stem of the daughter plant (FH). For statistical processing of the data, the IBM - SPSS version 22 program was used. The data obtained from the field evaluation were organized according to their corresponding variable and treatment. An exploratory data analysis was performed to determine the existence or absence of outliers that could affect the representativeness of the sample. The Shapiro Wilk test and Levene's test were then applied to corroborate the assumptions of normality and homoscedasticity, respectively. Once the statistical assumptions were met, the existence of significant differences was determined through a parametric test, such as the one-factor analysis of variance, which allowed identifying the existing differences through Duncan's post hoc tests with 99% reliability. The results obtained show that the foliar fertilizer corresponding to treatment T4 Banatrel showed the best results in all the variables evaluated with average values of 330.22 cm, 66 cm, 33.88 cm, 0.81 and 6.81 m2 in height of mother plant, stem of mother plant, stem of daughter plant, leaf emission and leaf area, respectively.