| Sumario: | Buffel grass, <i>Cenchrus ciliaris</i>, is a perennial tropical grass species native to Africa but widely distributed across tropical and subtropical regions, including parts of South America and Southeast Asia. It is primarily utilized as a forage crop due to its high biomass production and palatability for livestock. Agro-morphological study by Jorge et. al., (2008) on the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) genebank collection indicated the existence of genotypic variability among genotypes. Sánchez Gutiérrez et al. (2017; 2020) further studied the diversity of 126 and 157 Buffel grass genotypes, respectively, where five cluster groups were identified from the prior study based on the traits of forage biomass, plant growth parameters (plant height, tiller number leaf size) and feed quality traits while in later study four major groups were exhibited based on forage height, panicles per plant, caryopses per panicle and 50% of flowering. In addition, the performance assessment of Buffel genotypes under wet and dry seasons for forage yield and feed quality traits identified promising genotypes that produce high forage yield and better nutritional quality (Sánchez Gutiérrez et al., 2017). Evaluation of diverse candidate genotypes, under different environments representing tropical semi-arid conditions, is an important strategy to identify the best performing genotype for low moisture receiving areas. Therefore, to identify the best performing genotypes, promising candidate Buffel grass genotypes and/or core collection were selected based on previous studies (Sánchez Gutiérrez et al., 2017; Negawo et al., 2020) and planted in three locations in Ethiopia in 2023. The planted genotypes were evaluated for agro-morphological and feed quality traits from harvests conducted in wet and dry seasons. This report covers the morphological and biomass productivity of the accessions across three trial locations under rainfed conditions.
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