Effects of Sodic Water Irrigation and Neutralizing Amendments on Physiological, Biochemical, and Nutritional Quality Traits of Fodder Sorghum

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript provides valuable information on the benefits of intervene sorghum in rice–wheat cropping and the usage of pressmud instead of gypsum in reclaiming sodic soils. Overall, the manuscript presents a methodology adequate, and it has a good result in general. However, the data need further analysis and there are some questions need to be addressed. The detailed comments are listed below:

 

Q1. The title of manuscript is suggested to be shorten to make it more concise and readable.

 

Q2. Line 56: 103 or 10³?

 

Q3. Line 83: The EC (electrical conductivity) and SAR (sodium adsorption ratio) should give the full name when they are emerged at the first time.

 

Q4. In the end of the Introduction section, please provide the main aims of the study to make the research more meaningful.

 

Q5. In Materials and Methods section, it requires the manufacturer's name and location for specialized equipment, software, and reagents. Please consider adding this information on the basis of the journal's guidelines, and be consistent in the location information, which typically needs to be provided only once per supplier.

 

Q6. What’s the meaning of SEd and CD in the Tables?

 

Q7. Line 131-136: The sentence is too long to be understood. Please break it into 2 or 3 sentences.

 

Q8. Line 141-142: Usually, one sentence is not suitable to be used as a paragraph.

 

Q9. The manuscript provides lots of valuable data, however, they’re not well analyzed. Variance analysis, principal component analysis or pathway analysis are suggested to be used to analyze the data comprehensively.

 

Q10. The discussion section is the most critical part of this manuscript. It should be done according to results obtained in the study. The authors need to focus on their own results but not the conclusion of the other researchers.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 comments

Q1. The title of manuscript is suggested to be shorten to make it more concise and readable.

Response: Title of the manuscript has been revised as per the suggestion.

 

Q2. Line 56: 103 or 10³?

Response: 10³ is accurate and a change has been made in the manuscript (Revised Line no. 76).

 

 Q3. Line 83: The EC (electrical conductivity) and SAR (sodium adsorption ratio) should give the full name when they are emerged at the first time.

Response: Full name of both EC as well as SAR has been added (Line no. 102-103).

 

 Q4. In the end of the Introduction section, please provide the main aims of the study to make the research more meaningful.

Response: Main aims of the study are provided in form of hypothesis (Line no. 156-160).

 

 Q5. In Materials and Methods section, it requires the manufacturer's name and location for specialized equipment, software, and reagents. Please consider adding this information on the basis of the journal's guidelines, and be consistent in the location information, which typically needs to be provided only once per supplier.

Response: Details of specialized equipment (wherever equipment is mentioned), i.e., portable gas exchange device and portable pulse-modulated fluorescence metre has been already provided (Revised Line no. 300 & 304).

 

 Q6. What’s the meaning of SEd and CD in the Tables?

Response: full form of CD: Critical difference; SEd: Standard error of difference has been added to each table.

 

 Q7. Line 131-136: The sentence is too long to be understood. Please break it into 2 or 3 sentences.

Response: Revision has been made as per suggestions in manuscript.

 

 Q8. Line 141-142: Usually, one sentence is not suitable to be used as a paragraph.

Response: Revision has been made as per suggestions in manuscript.

 

Q9. The manuscript provides lots of valuable data, however, they’re not well analyzed. Variance analysis, principal component analysis or pathway analysis are suggested to be used to analyze the data comprehensively.

Response: All the recorded parameters were analyzed with analysis of variance (ANOVA) technique for split-factorial. Further, pairwise comparisons of treatments effects were made using the LSD (least significance difference) test at p≤0.05. SEd and CD values as a major part ANOVA table are provided for each parameter and in each table.

 

 Q10. The discussion section is the most critical part of this manuscript. It should be done according to results obtained in the study. The authors need to focus on their own results but not the conclusion of the other researchers.

Response: Discussion part has been revised as per the results obtained in this study; only relevant literature has been cited to support the findings.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Reviewed manuscript describes the results of very complex field study concerning fodder sorghum quality (nutritional, agronomical. biochemical). Author team analyzed numerous aspects of sorghum cultivation, from economical to nutritional. The advantage of study complexity is also simultanously disadvantageous, since numerous variables contributed to overall results. The vast of data collected was described in a way that is sometimes difficult to follow, owing to numerous used abbreviations, listing of numerical data in the text, massive tables that are overloaded with data. Additionally, discussion is really poor in relation to the vast of results. In my opinion, Authors should rethink the content of the manuscript, select the most sound and impactful results, and focus on them during results presentation - and discuss them showing advantages of proposed approaches.

Authors claim that pressmud could to some extent cover the need for gypsum supply for neutralization and improve the quality of sorghum- I find this aspect particularly interesting, but there is almost no comment on it in the discussion. Generally, such numerous data, ranging from physiological to economical to agronomical, are hardly discussed.

I strongly appreciate the work that Authors team had to conduct to perform this study.  However, sometimes too much information is not the best solution for study clarity and scientific soundness. I would recommend to make the mansucript shorter and more concise, and supported with insightful discussion of most novel/important results.

 

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 comments

Response:

As our manuscript is targeting several aspects of summer intervened fodder sorghum in an ongoing rice-wheat system, the basic parameters for each aspect are essential, i.e., productivity and profitability of the system; physiological and biochemical traits of sorghum; and its fodder quality. However, the manuscript has been shortened, and data related to certain parameters i.e., sodium, potassium, organic matter, total carbohydrate, hemicellulose, and cell soluble (from Tables 2 and 3) has been removed from the main manuscript and presented in a supplementary file of the revision (Table S8). Results related to these parameters have also been removed from the main text to make the manuscript more concise. In our view, further shortening/removing parameters from the manuscript will reduce the quality of manuscript.

The discussion part has also been improved. The neutralization mechanism through the application of pressmud is provided in the discussion part (lines 13–23). Though the full name of each abbreviation is mentioned whenever it appears for the first time, and details of all abbreviations are also provided at the end of the manuscript for easy following.

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx