Oats in ethiopia

Abstract

Introduct ion of Mediterranean crops to Ethiopia took place in the early days of history. Some of them, such as wheat, barley and chick-pea, became major crops there and acquired t remendous genetic diversity. This led Vavilov (1951) to consider Ethiopia as a secondary center of these crops. In spite of its being a Mediterranean genus, oats were not domesticated in the Middle-East (Helbaek 1960) and were no t introduced as such to Ethiopia. Even today, the cultivated hexaploid oat A. sativa is no t a crop there. Individual plants of this oat, however, can be found as contaminants in fields of newly introduced wheat varieties. Nevertheless, oat does grow in Ethiopia as a weed. It is found in cereal fields together with other Mediterranean weeds, such as Lolium temulentum, Ammi majus and Medicago hispida. These weeds were most probably introduced to Ethiopia with the cultivated plants and have established themselves there as the crops. The weedy oats of Ethiopia are the tetraploid (2n=28) forms of series Eubarbatae and the wild hexaploids (2n=42) of subsection Denticulatae. These oats are successful weeds in the Mediterranean region and in other agricultural belts of the world with similar conditions. In Ethiopia, these oats are confined to cultivated fields at elevations of 2200-2800 m, but they are absent, as well as any other oat species, from the natural vegetation at this altitude. The distribution, the ecology and the genetics of these weedy oats are as follows.