Grain Yield Stability and Agronomic Performance of Tef Genotypes in Western Oromia

Abstract

Tef, Eragrostis tef (Zucc.) Trotter, is the major Ethiopian cereal grown on about 3 million hectares annually. Because of its gluten-free proteins and slow release carbohydrate constituents, tef is recently being advocated and promoted as health crop at the global level. Because of this importance and lack of enough improved varieties of tef, this activity was conducted in three locations to identify and further evaluate stable tef varieties .For this purpose, several genotypes were evaluated under different breeding stage so as to screen and reach to the stable once. Accordingly, the year 2014/15 25 genotypes were tested in preliminary variety trial out of which nine genotypes were advanced to regional variety trial and tested in 2016 in multi-locations. Finally the combined analysis of variance across the three locations revealed highly significant (p<0.01) difference among genotypes for plant height, panicle length, shoot biomass, lodging % and grain yield. Two test genotypes, viz.236952and 55253  found to be stable, high yielder and lodging tolerant across the tasted locations with grain yield advantage of 26%, 19.29% and 11.13% over the standard check respectively. Therefore based on their high yield and stable performance,  genotypes 236952 and 55253 were promoted to Variety Verification Trial (VVT) evaluation and for possible release.

Keywords: Eragrostis tef, stability,