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Highly client-oriented
breeding with farmer participation in the Ethiopian cereal
tef [Eragrostis tef (Zucc.) Trotter]
Getachew Belay*, Hailu Tefera, Anteneh Getachew, Kebebew
Assefa and Gizaw Metaferia
Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research, Debre Zeit
Centre, P.O. Box 32, Debre Zeit, Ethiopia.
Corresponding author. E-mail:
tef-res@ethionet.et
. Tel: +251-11-4331187. Fax: 251-11-4338061
Accepted 1 November 2007 |
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This paper
describes a highly client-oriented breeding applied to
enhance the development and release of a tef (Eragrostis
tef) variety with farmer participation in Ethiopia. The
main features include; clear objective, target cross,
early-stage researcher selection, multi-location yield
trial, farmer on-station selection, judicious selection of
few candidate varieties based on farmers' and researchers'
selections, farmer managed on-farm trials, and release
through the existing formal procedure. In the application of
this strategy, tef exemplifies a crop with local importance,
a clear market-driven selection criterion (cash crop) and
farmers have better judgment of the criterion than
researchers. Using farmers'
consistent selection of genotypes, in conjunction with the
required quantifiable data, breeders were able to release a
new tef variety named "Quncho". The new variety was
not the highest yielder, but it was higher in grain yield
and better in seed-color quality (very white seed-color)
than the long-time cultivated variety DZ-01-196 (Magna),
which was used as quality check. Given the appropriate
degree of client-orientation, the results also show how
farmer participation and formal breeding programs complement
each other so as to overcome the rather prohibitive variety
release procedures based on data from participatory breeding
alone.
Key
words:
Highly client-oriented breeding, Eragrostis tef,
Ethiopia, participatory breeding, tef variety.
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