Controlling indeterminate lentil crop growth through nitrogen supply

Lentil is an indeterminate pulse crop, which means it has a growth habit where vegetative growth continues during reproductive growth. In wet years and when it has a high nitrogen (N) supply, lentil fails to mature in the short growing season on the Prairies, resulting in low unstable yields.  In this research, we plan to investigate how lentil indeterminacy can be managed by four strategies. The first is to test if lentil maturity can be controlled by soil N supply in zero tillage and conventional tillage soils. The second is to test if a desiccant at low concentrations can trigger senescence and maturity under high N conditions. The third strategy is to test if nine lentil genotypes that are commercially grown vary in N uptake, N fixation, or N redistribution within the plant during reproductive growth. Finally, the fourth strategy is to identify earlier establishing and earlier senescing rhizobia strains so N fixation will only occur up to mid-reproductive growth. Together, all these strategies will give us a detailed understanding of how N is partitioned in lentil in order to have satisfactory crop maturity.