Response of tomato plants to deficit irrigation under surface or subsurface drip irrigation

Abstract: Field studies were conducted to compare the yield and fruit quality of processing tomatoes in surface and subsurface drip irrigation, with 100 and 50% of crop evapotranspiration (ETc). The results showed that when irrigation was reduced by 50% ETc the subsurface treatment showed higher water content at root depth compared with the on-surface treatment. At 50% ETc subsurface irrigation yield increased by 66.5% compared with the surface treatment. However at 100% ETc no significant difference in total fruit yield was observed between irrigation methods. The superficial and water-stressed treatment increased the pH and the acidity of the fruits but the subsurface treatment did not show differences with respect to the full-irrigation treatments. Our results show that the subsurface drip irrigation method could be reasonably applied for processing tomato when water resources are limited.