Potato Yield and Yield Components as Affected by Positive Selection During Several Generations of Seed Multiplication in
- PDF / 1,450,517 Bytes
- 37 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 9 Downloads / 247 Views
Potato Yield and Yield Components as Affected by Positive Selection During Several Generations of Seed Multiplication in Southwestern Uganda Uta Priegnitz, et al. [full author details at the end of the article] Received: 12 September 2019 / Accepted: 13 February 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is an important crop in Uganda but production is low. There is not a well-functioning official seed system and farmers use potato tubers from a previous harvest as seed. This study investigated how effectively the seed technology positive selection enhanced yield and underlying crop characteristics across multiple seasons, compared to the farmers’ selection method. Positive selection is selecting healthy plants during crop growth for harvesting seed potato tubers to be planted in the next season. Farmers’ selection involves selection of seed tubers from the bulk of the ware potato harvest. Positive selection was compared to farmers’ seed selection for up to three seasons in three field trials in different locations in southwestern Uganda using seed lots from different origins. Across all experiments, seasons and seed lots, yields were higher under positive selection than under farmers’ selection. The average yield increase resulting from positive selection was 12%, but yield increases were variable, ranging from − 5.7% to + 36.9%, and in the individual experiments often not significant. These yield increases were due to higher yields per plant, and mostly higher weights per tuber, whereas the numbers of tubers per plant were not significantly different. Experimentation and yield assessment were hampered by a varying number of plants that could not be harvested because plants had to be rogued from the experimental plots because of bacterial wilt (more frequent under farmers’ selection than under positive selection), plants disappeared from the experimental field and sometimes plants did not emerge. Nevertheless, adoption of positive selection should be encouraged due to a higher production and less virus infection of seed tubers in positive selected plants, resulting in a lower degeneration rate of potato seed tubers. Keywords Multi-seasonal trials . Positive selection . Seed degeneration . Seed potatoes .
Seed regeneration . Uganda . Yield increase
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11540-02009455-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Potato Research
Introduction Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is one of the main staple crops for food and nutrition security in Uganda (Whitney et al. 2017), where it serves also as a cash crop for smallholder farmers (Gildemacher et al. 2009; Olanya et al. 2012). While Uganda has a large potato production area, average yields with 4.2 Mg ha−1 are lower than in other East-African countries (FAO 2019) and far below the attainable yield of 25 Mg ha−1 (International Potato Center 2011). One of the most important yield-defining factors in potato production is the qu
Data Loading...
