Components of seed yield

• Yield components are measures of a crop or plant population that, when multiplied together, combine to determine the total crop yield.
• Yield components are often used to help understand the reasons for superior or inferior performance.
• For example, in measuring the quantity of pasture in a paddock, herbage mass can be expressed in terms of two yield components, tiller weight and tiller population density, with a conversion factor of 10 as follows:

Herbage mass ( Kg DM/ha) = Tiller population density (tillers/m²) x tiller weight (g DM) x 10

This equation can be used to determine whether a nitrogen response comes through increasing sward tiller population or tiller size, or both population and tiller size.