| Sumario: | Evolutionary Plant Breeding (EPB) is an approach that combines diversity usage and evolutionary processes to increase on-farm buffering capacity against changing environmental conditions. It harnesses existing crop diversity and exposes crop varieties to these changing farm conditions to enhance the genotypic adaptation of component plants of the local populations. It enhances the sustainability of agriculture and food systems by increasing and stabilizing yield, improving resilience to climate change, and ensuring nutritional security.
Strong global evidence has been generated regarding the potential of EPB to improve farm productivity and resilience, reduce environmental impact, and greatly enhance grain nutrient contents that consequently improve consumers' health. It seems that improving productivity, resilience, and nutrition, as well as reducing environmental impacts, are somewhat paradoxical, but not in evolutionary plant breeding!
Smallholder farmers operating under marginal production environments have been facing challenges of productivity decline, vulnerability to climate-related stresses, as well as increased production costs. This seminar will share a study that addresses such questions 1) how does EPB increase the farm productivity of smallholder farmers? 2) how does growing varietal mixtures (VM) or composite cross populations (CCP) reduce the impacts of climate-related stresses on farm productivity? 3) are VM and/or CCP better grain nutrient accumulators compared to the pure stand varieties? 4) is growing VM and/or CCP economically for smallholder farmers that are growing pure stand varieties of the same crop?
Field experiments were conducted during the 2023 and 2024 North Shoa and Hadiya zones to test the performance of evolutionary populations (EPs) of faba bean with the aim of i) studying the performance of formed populations in comparison with included pure stand varieties and ii) selecting individual plants from the populations that showed superior performance for traits of interest. Three populations were tested together with two pure stand varieties at each location. Table 1 summarizes the type of population and pure stand varieties tested at Abamote of the North Shoa zone and Shrumo of the Hadiya zone. At Abamote, breeders’ selection applied to all varietal mixtures, and a 4th varietal composite (VM4) was formed and included in the 2024 cropping season trial. Relatively higher BY and GY were recorded from VM4 (8.18 t ha-1 and 3.58 t ha-1) followed by VM3 (5.69 t ha-1 and 3.02 t ha-1) at Abamote, indicating the potential of these VMs to better adapt to the study area. At the Shurmo site, VM3 gave higher (3.3 t ha-1) GY and BY (11.91 t ha-1), demonstrating that VM3 was the best performer original faba bean mixture at both sites.
These heterogeneous mixtures reacted very differently to faba bean diseases such as chocolate spot and faba bean gall. The reaction to diseases commonly varies across various crop developmental stages. The varietal mix formed by experts’ selection, VM4, has recorded the lowest severity for chocolate spot, at both stages, and faba bean gall (Fig. 1). Shewa, the improved pure stand variety (PS2), has suffered the most from both diseases, followed by VM1 and VM2. There is no significant difference in the reaction among PS1, VM1, VM2, and VM3 to both the Chocolate spot and the faba bean gall diseases. VM4, however, is statistically lower in severity. It can be inferred that some VMs of faba bean, such as VM4, have combined high GY with better tolerance to faba bean diseases. Their combination of such important traits ensures access to tolerant and high-yielding varieties of faba bean for farmers and ensures the sustainability of the subsistent mixed farming system. The access to such mixtures could ensure resilience to climate change-related stresses, i.e., diseases, improve farm productivity and hence food and nutritional security. The high biomass yield contributes to livestock feed and soil fertility management.
|
|---|