These papers describe the status, challenges and opportunities of spices production in Ethiopia. It has the highest potential to produce a lot of spice crops. The country mainly produces; Korarima, chillies, turmeric, ginger, black pepper, cumin, fenugreek, coriander and so forth. In spite of the fact that the country has great potential for various spices production, the subsector of spices had remained and neglected and subsequently the level of production and share of spice crops of the total export earning of the country is at considerably low level. Hence, it is essential to describe the status, challenges and opportunities of spices sector in Ethiopia, for best uses of the potential and used spice crop resources. Among the various spices crops, chilli/hot pepper is the most commonly produced spices in Ethiopia. Similarly, the Ethiopian spice productions have showed a declining trend from 2013 onwards. This is mainly due to the disease that considerably affects ginger production and the rapid increasing domestic demand of spices. Therefore, intervention and provide awareness for spices growers on using improved production and processing technology, training across all production and productivity, formulating strong marketing regulations and proclamation is of paramount importance to increase the production, profits and productivity.

Background: The current study conducted to analysis the bottom water potential zones in Odiyo watershed. The study relies on the secondary data, which is collected from concern department and through internet. Totally nine parameters are consider for the study like drainage density, elevation, geology, geomorphology, land use and land cover, lineaments, rainfall pattern, slope gradient and soil texture. The chosen parameters are prepared and classified in GIS environment, then weightage for every parameter and its classes are assigned using Analytical Hierarchical Process, and eventually, weighted overlay analysis in ArcGIS accustomed discover the result. Results: The result relived that, about 183.87ha (0.613%) areas are having very high, 4846.23ha (16.18%) area are having high, 19229.4 ha (64.19%) having moderate, 5645.7ha (18.855) having low and 48.6ha (0.16%) area are having very low potential of well water. Conclusions: The knowledge on strength of ground water supported ground water zones help in management and development of the groundwater within the study area.

Article Info Declining soil fertility status and poor agronomic practices, including minimum use of inorganic fertilizers and inappropriate plant population are the major reasons for low productivity of soybean. A field experiment was carried out to determine the response of soybean to plant population and NP fertilizer in Kersa woreda of Jimma zone, south western Ethiopia during the 2015/2016 cropping season. Four levels of NP fertilizer (23/23, 23/46, 46/46 and 69/69 kg/ha) and plant population (166667, 200000, 33333 and 400000 plants/ha) were laid out in a factorial experiment in randomized complete block design with three replications. The analysis of variance also showed that the interaction effects of plant population and NP fertilizer were significant on number of pods, pod length, number of nodules, hundred seed weight, biomass yield and grain yield. Whereas plant population had significant influences on days to 50% flowering, days to 50% maturity, number of branch, number of nodules, plant height, leaf area, number of pods, number of seed per pod, hundred seed weight, biomass yield, and grain yield. Likewise, the main effects of NP fertilizer was significant on number of pods, number of branches, number of leaves, leaf area, plant height, days to maturity, fresh and dry weights, pod length, hundred seed weight, gran yield and harvest index. The highest grain and biomass yields of 1960 and 5491.7 kg/ha were recorded at the same a combination of plant population and NP fertilizer.