Agronomic performance of improved pearl millet cultivars in southern Chad

Abstract

Pearl millet [Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.] is a vital staple food crop for poor people in dry-land areas. It plays an important role on human consumption in South of Chad where farmers always used landraces with a little adoption of improved cultivars. Evaluation of agronomic performance of inbred cultivars at research station is important to identify the high performance genotype to be released as new cultivars in farmer area. So, five improved varieties associated with a well-known variety from research were evaluated for ten agronomical traits. Experiment was carried out during rainy season of 2019 at the research station of Bébédjia, South of Chad. The results of the analysis of variance of assessed traits showed high significant differences (p<0.001) for spike girth and slight significant difference (p<0.05) for days to flowering, thousand seeds weight and productive tillers per plant. An important positive and significant correlations were also noted between day to flowering and number of grains per plot (r = 0.7; p<0.01), seed weight per plot (0.684; p<0.01) and potential grain yield (r = 0.684; p<0.01). Moreover, three cultivars with an important potential grains yield namely ICMV167006 (4.99 t.ha−1), ICMV 167005 (4.68 t.ha−1) and ICMV177111 (3.98 t.ha−1) were identified. Otherwise, for the days to flowering, the cultivars ICMV167006 (73.67 days), ICMV 167005 (75.33 days) are earlier than ICMV 177 111 (78.67 days). These cultivars could be proposed to be released in farmer area as novel cultivars.

Effect of Seasonal Temperature on the Genotypic Variability of Flowering Duration in Pearl Millet (Pennisetum glaucum) in Niger

“…Although heat stress can occur at any time during the cycle, its effect is more significant at the flowering and grain-filling stage (Kumar, 2004;Kholova et al, 2010;Gupta et al, 2015) and makes the crop productivity depends on effective sexual reproduction. Most of the previous work has focused on the length of the sowing-heading or sowing-flowering cycle and its relationship with the final grain yield (Naoura et al, 2020;Anuradha et al, 2017;Anuradha et al, 2018). Very few works have focused on the duration of sexual reproduction (and therefore the time of exposure of floral organs to high temperatures) and its genotypic variability, knowledge of which could help improve efficiency for the selection of millet varieties more tolerant to thermal stress.…”