Corn Crop Performance in Different Levels of Defoliation

The aim of this work was to evaluate the effect of the yield and morphological components of the maize crop according to different levels of defoliation in the phenological stages of the crop. The experimental design was a randomized block with 7 treatments and 4 replicates. The treatments were: control without defoliation (SD), removal of two leaves (2L-V4) and four leaves (4L-V4) in the V4 stage , removal of the leaves of the lower third (LT-VT), removal of the middle third (MT-VT), removal of the upper third (UT-VT) and total removal (SF-VT) of the leaves in the VT stage. Plant height and spike insertion, number of grains, number of rows, grains per rows, one thousand grain mass and yield were assessed. Plants with total leaf removal had the lowest rates in all aspects evaluated. The number of rows, kernels per row and kernel per spike showed little or no variation in the treatments with partial defoliation. The treatments with removal at the middle and upper third had the lowest values for the analyzed variables when compared to the plants with partial defoliation. The results of this work indicate that the defoliation process can damage the corn yield performance.