The number of days after emergency is commonly used to define the rice plant stage, despite the existence of a growth scale. The use of chronological time is not ideal, once it is dependent of the cultivar life cycle and environmental conditions, which are known to affect the plant development. The goal of this study was to validate a rice growth scale for three Brazilian flooded rice cultivars, with different life cycles and in three sowing dates. The experiment was conducted in tanks in Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. The three sowing dates were October 14, November 13 and December 18, 2003, and the cultivars chosen were BR-IRGA 409, medium cycle, IRGA 417, early cycle, and IRGA 421, very early cycle. Each cultivar was sowed in three lines, spaced 0.15m from each other, to produce a population of 250 plants m-2. Ten plants composed each sample. The R1 stage (panicle differentiation) was reached when the plants had seven expanded leaves in all treatments, independently of the chronological plant age. A reduction in the number of expanded leaves at the R2 stage (flag leaf collar formation) was only observed for IRGA 421 in the last sowing date. However, the number of days required for each cultivar to reach R2 stage was different. As the sowing date was delayed, the chronological time between each growth stage was reduced. The rice growth scale was much more efficient than the chronological age to determine the plant stage. Therefore, using the rice growth scale is possible to interfere at the correct moment, allowing high yields and rational resource use.
Oryza sativa; sowing dates; phenology; development cycle
