In order to study the effects of water stress on quantitative and qualitative yield of pearl millet, this experiment was conducted in the Spring of 1995 at Seed and Plant Improvement Research Institute field station in Karaj. The design of this experiment was a randomized complete block design with four treatments and four replicatoions. In this research, the effects of four irrigation intervals on the basis of relative water content (R WC), at four ranges of 95-90%, 85-80%, 75-70%, and 65-60%, were studied. Effects of these treatments on quantitative yield included fresh weight (FW), dry weight (DW), leaf dry weight (LDW), stem dry weight (SDW), and protein yield (PY) and on qualitative yield such as leaf/stem, crude protein (CP), crude fiber (CF), and ash percentage of forage millet "Nutrifeed" were evaluated. Results indicated that aU characters under study were affected by water stress and there were significant negative correlations among characters with treatments imposed. The check treatment (irrigated at R WC= 90-95%) with production of 12.58 kglm2 fresh forage and 357.89 glm2 crude protein had better responses considering all the quantitative and qualitative characters as compared with stress treatments. In comparison of two cuttings, the second
cutting in spite of reduction in forage quantity (4.11 kg/m2 fresh forage a_ compared with 5.18 kg/mZ in first cutting) had better quality in cmparison with the first cutting (15.36% crude protein as compared with 13.80% in the first cutting
)