Author(s):

Veena Kumari Tudu, Manigopa Chakraborty, Savita Ekka, Milan Kumar Chakravarty, Krishna Prasad, Rameswar Prasad Sah and Satish Chandra Narayan

Abstract: Maize, third leading cereal crop, is one of the important foods, green forage and industrial crops of the world. Maize occupies a prominent position and each part of the maize plant is put to one or the other use and nothing goes as waste. Tursicum or northern corn leaf blight (TLB) caused by Exserohilum tursicum, is a serious foliar disease of maize, distributed widely throughout the world, causing significant yield losses. Yield loss is caused predominantly through loss of photosynthetic leaf area due to blighting. Disease symptoms first appear on the leaves at any stage of plant growth, but usually at or after anthesis. Potassium (K), a major soil nutrient, affects the reaction of a plant to pest or disease. It affects the plant's ability to recover from pest or disease attack through the repair of damage or, more simply and most frequently, by a general improvement of growth. Considering the role of K in disease management, an experiment was conducted to study the disease reaction of TLB in twelve maize hybrids, developed by crossing four high productive female with three drought tolerant tester. Potassium was applied as basal dose of two different concentration of 60kg/ha and 100kg/ha along with same dose of Nitrogen & Phosphorus @ 150:60kg/ha. Analysis of variance of arc sin transformed data for tursicum leaf blight revealed significant variability among the hybrids at both K levels. At high dose of potassium, hybrids was observed with less severity of disease. The hybrids was observed with a disease reaction of Moderately resistant but for three hybrids, at high dose of potassium less severity was observed and the disease reaction changes to resistant thus signifying that high dose of K enhances the plants ability to resist against disease incidence.

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