Evaluation of Local Maize collections for drought Tolerance

English

One hundred local maize collections, including two improved varieties, Dobidi and Okomasa, were evaluated at Legon and Fumesua in Ghana over 2 years (1997 and 1998) during the dry seasons to determine the productivity of local maize varieties under moisture•stress, compare the performance of local and improved varietiess under moisture stress, and to select some of the accessions for further evaluation. Drought affected the plants significantly under the conditions of the experiment. There were significant differences among the 100 accessions in the mean expression of the number of days to silking, ear height, number of plants harvested, number of ears harvested, stover weight. 1000-seed weight, and grain yield. Analysis of variance showed significant effects of environment (location x year), accessions, and accessions x environment interaction for all of the characters. studied. Significant correlations were observed between the number of ears harvested and grain yield (r=0.6), and between silking and grain yield 6-0.4). Most of the local collections performed better than thè improved varieties, which did not rank among the top 20 accessions. The authors are currently evaluating some of the promising accessions under drought and irrigated conditions. It is suggested that genes for drought tolerance be identified and introgressed into the improved varieties.

Danquah, E. Y.; Sallah, P. Y. K.; Blay, E. T.; Aboagye-Nuamah, F.