Abstract
Finger millet is one of the most neglected and underutilized crops worldwide, yet an important food cereal for millions of poor farmers in Africa. An experiment was carried out to determine adaptation range of diverse set of finger millet accessions and identify superior types with excellent yield potential for use as cultivar or as germplasm source for future breeding endeavors. A total of 44 indigenous accessions selected in previous evaluations and two check varieties were tested in two sets (mixed and colored) each containing 22 entries in a total of 11 environments between 2004 and 2008 seasons. Data were collected on grain yield, days to flowering, and plant height. The result showed that 2.5%, 79.1% and 18.3% of the total sum of squares in the mixed set and 2.1%, 86.9% and 11.0% in the colored set was attributed to genotype, environment, and genotype × environment interaction (GEI) effects, respectively. Furthermore, 54.6% and 46.19% of the GEI sum of squares in the mixed and in the colored set, respectively, were contributed by the first two interaction principal component axes (IPCA1 and IPCA2). A white seed accession (Acc. 203572) from the mixed set and three other accessions (Acc. 229469, Acc. 203410 and Acc. 203539) from the colored set were most stable and also had above average mean grain yield across environment and thus are recommended for release as cultivars to improve finger millet production in these environments.
Highlights
Majority of the test entries were from selections made among the 2003 observation nursery that contained a pool of landrace collections received from the Ethiopian Institute of Biodiversity Conservation (IBC)
The data were subjected to analysis of variance (ANOVA) for each of the environments and for the combined data using SAS 9.1 (SAS Institute)
The influence of genotype × environment interaction (GEI) resulted in variable performance of the genotypes in the different test environments
Summary
Indigenous to eastern Africa, finger millet is widely produced in the cool high altitude areas in the region primarily as source of food and for making traditional alcoholic beverages [2]. Finger millet is often mixed with other grain crops such as tef or sorghum to make composite flour for local food preparation such as injera and porridge. It is often valued as nutritious cereal by local people. This observation has scientific merit in that finger millet contains relatively higher concentration of calcium and dietary fiber than other cereals [3]
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