Participatory Assessment of the Potential of Traditional Lowland Rainfed Rice Varieties in Lower Casamance

Abstract

Casamance was perceived as an agricultural granary that had rice potential which could meet the high food demand of Senegal. Given that the rice-growing lands have been degraded due to pedoclimatic variabilities, improved modern varieties are not usually well adapted to the Casamance rice-growing ecosystems. This work aims to contribute to the increase of rice production through varietal diversification and enhancement of cultural heritage. A participatory evaluation of five local farmers’ traditional varieties along with one check was carried out in an experiment laid out in a one-factor complete randomized block design using the six accessions with five replications. ANOVA followed by a 5% mean comparison Tukey test and the Kendall Rate were performed with IBM SPSS Statistics software. The result showed very significant varietal differences for leaf blade of the penultimate leaves, 100-grains weight, panicle length, growth cycle, plant height, ramification of secondary branching of the spikelets, resistance to lodging and threshing facility (p ≤ 0.005). However, traits including flag leaf, tiller numbers, sterile tillers number, panicle numbers, panicle yield, and grain yield did not show a significant difference (p ≥ 0.06) among varieties. Thus, based on some of these characteristics, farmers selected their most preferred rice varieties or accessions. The most important characteristics were tillering ability, lodging resistance and fertility rate. Koussik Emandiouck selected by farmers as the best variety, had a high grain yield (4.9 t∙ha-1), higher lodging resistance (9), and higher fertility rate (80.53%). Koussik Emandiouck, Koufekeny and Awandiaho varieties were the most preferred by farmers.