Performance evaluation of sorghum (sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) genotypes for grain yield and yield related traits

Abstract

Sorghum is the third most important cereal crop after maize and rice. The area under sorghum production in Uganda is at 398,050 ha accounting for 314,553 tons total annual production. This places Uganda as the fourth leading sorghum producer in East Africa, after South Sudan, Tanzania and Ethiopia, (Andiku et al., 2021). However, low yield is one of the things which frustrates the farmer’s efforts and in most cases farmers are left with no choice but to accept the loses as there has not been a permanent solution to this problem, except for farmers untested indigenous knowledge. This research study therefore, proposes to determine the performance evaluation of (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) genotypes for grain yield and yield related traits. This experiment was carried out in Arapai campus field in alpha lattice design where 60 genotypes were randomly assigned to plots within blocks. Panicle length, panicle width, plant height, 50% days to flowering, 75% maturity, 100 seed weight, panicle weight, etc. are the parameters measured and Data collection, was done using excel and data was analyzed using GenStat 15th edition by running the analysis of variance (ANOVA) to obtain the Means, Least significant Differences (LSD), Coefficients of Variation (CV) and F-probability. The analysis of variance was highly significant for yield and harvest index (P<0.001), 100 seed weight, biological yield, panicle weight, panicle width, panicle length, plant height were significantly low P<0.05) across the genotypes, the mean grain yield of 891.9kg/ha was recorded across the sorghum genotypes, sapkab22b_019 having the highest grain yield of 4963kg/ha, Most of the best yielding sorghum genotypes were medium maturing and The bottom five genotypes had grain yield ranging from 526.3kg/ha to 451.4kg/ha, the lowest grain yield among the bottom five genotypes was recorded in genotype sapkab22b_118, and sapkab22b_095.based on season performance, the harvest index had a strong positive correlation with yield (r = 0.82, p<0.001). Conclusively, the sorghum genotypes showed different levels of yield indicating wide variability for sorghum yield among the selected sorghum genotypes, high yield was noticed in all the seasons but it was significantly higher in second season of 2022B than the first rainy season of 2023A.The selected high yielding sorghum genotypes could be used as breeding lines for development of cultivar with farmer preferred traits.