ABSTRACT
Agricultural research has repeatedly failed to achieve the required effect for dapter low-income farmers especially in Africa like Ethiopia. Some of the reasons for the failure are due to lack of varieties which can suit to growing environment. As a result, there is a persistent need to look high yielding disease resistant variety to increase production and productivity in sustainable ways. Due to biotic and abiotic factors, it has become important to evaluate sorghum landrace collections in different environments and select the promising stable landraces. Fifteen sorghum landraces were evaluated in four different environments using RCBD design. Highly significant (P < 0.001) differences for required days for flowering (days), grain yield (Kg/ha) and other related traits was observed. The smallest days for flowering (65 days) was recorded for sorghum landrace ETSL 100005 indicated that this landrace can be bred for earliness. The highest grain yield (6583.3 and 6448.6 Kg/ha) was recorded in Makush and Icid respectively. In addition, the landraces ETSL 100008 was observed as the lowest Anthracnose disease score (1.0). The presence of this phenotypic and genotypic variability among the collected landraces indicates that the genotypes could be used in future sorghum breeding programs for further manipulation to develop breeding lines with improved attributes. The results of AMMI analysis indicated that the sorghum landrace performance were highly influenced by genotype main effects, environment effects and G x E interaction effects; the magnitude of environment and its interaction effect for grain yield was 2.3 times that of variation attributed due to genotype main effects indicating that the importance of G x E. Those genotypes with lower sensitivity estimate (β) were most stable and wide adapters. The sorghum landrace ETSL 100001, ETSL 100011 and ETSL 100010) in grain yield were recorded with lowest sensitivity and hence they were most stable and wider adaptable. Therefore, development of an dapter and stable genotypes is needed to improve livelihood of farmers in Ethiopia and other regions with similar agro ecologies.
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