Modeling the Growth of Forage Legumes

Modeling the growth curve of agricultural crops is of paramount importance so that management tasks such as fertilization and irrigation can be carried out at the appropriate time, increasing the vegetal yield. With this purpose, nonlinear models are commonly employed. The objective of this work was to fit some of the main nonlinear models that best describe the growth curve of some of the main species of forage legumes, namely: Crotalaria juncea, Canavalia ensiformis, Cajanus cajan and Dolichos lablab L. A randomized block experiment was conducted in field conditions between November 2015 and February 2016 in southeastern Goias, Brazil. The variables plant height, stem diameter, fresh and dry mass were measured after 15, 30, 45, 60 and 90 days from sowing. The following models were fitted: Gompertz, Logistic, Brody and von Bertalanffy. The following goodness-of-fit criteria were calculated: R2 (normal and adjusted), AIC (Akaike Information Criterion) and absolute mean error. The growth curves of morphological variables are easier to model than the biomass curves. The von Bertalanffy and Gompertz models presented in general the best fit. The species C. juncea has an expressive biomass accumulation rate.