Evaluation and Participatory Variety Selection of Tomato (Lycopersicum esculentum Mill.) for Yield and Related Traits

Abstract

Tomato is one of the most important commercial and food vegetable crops in Ethiopia. Even though, the crop is dominantly cultivated in the rift valley area it also produced in the study area for local market. The crop is produced by the farmers by using varieties which the source is not known and poor in yield and low in disease tolerance. Hence, participatory variety selection through demonstration of four tomato varieties was conducted at Wondo Genet and Wondo woredas during 2020/2021. The experiment was conducted on station for researchers’ data collection by replicating three times and non-replicated plot basis for farmers’ evaluation. Four tomato varieties; Gelelima, Chali, ARP-d2 tomato and Melka salsa were used for evaluation purpose. The researcher data and farmers preferences were analyzed using SAS software and pair wise ranking respectively. The result showed that highest marketable fruit yield (49.83t ha-1) was obtained from Gelelima and the lowest (39.10t ha-1) was from the Melka salsa variety. Pair wise raking of farmers preference also, shown that Gelelima was the first and best variety according to their criterion at both locations. Therefore, based on the result obtained it is better and recommended to produce Gelelima tomato variety for the farmers of Wondo Genet and Wondo woreda and other similar agro-ecologies.