Genotype-Environment Interaction and Stability Analysis of Hybrid Maize Varieties in North West Ethiopia

Abstract

Maize (Zea mays L.) is one of the principal food crops in Amhara region of Ethiopia. A project on SIMLESA is aimed at increasing the range of maize varieties available for small holder farmers of Amhara region. In this study, eight improved maize hybrid varieties were evaluated across ten environments of Jabitehinan and South Achefer districts. Combined analysis of variance for grain yield across test environments indicated that the mean squares for environments, genotypes and genotype by environment interaction were highly significant and accounted for 66.73, 5.04 and 12.17% of treatment combination sum of squares, respectively. Based on the grain yield performance of the tested varieties, AMH-851(Jibat), BH-661 and PHB-3253 (Jabi) were identified as the three high yielding varieties across the testing environments. GGE biplot analysis identified that AMH-851 (Jibat) was the most stable and desirable hybrid followed by hybrids BH-661 and PHB-3253. Compared with other tested varieties, BHQPY-545 and PHB-3253 were selected as early maturing varieties with 156 and 149 days to maturity, respectively. Therefore, AMH-851 (Jibat) as a potential variety, BHQPY-545 and PHB-3253(Jabi) as early maturing varieties, are recommended for Jabitehinan and South Achefer districts. INTRODUCTION Maize (Zea mays L.) is originated in Central America and was introduced to Africa in the early 1500s by the Portuguese traders (Dowswell et al., 1996). It is one of the well known cereal crop that can be successfully grown in many parts of the world over a wide range of environmental conditions and ranked third after wheat and rice in terms of cultivation area, total production and consumption (IITA., 2007). The crop is used as source of food for human beings and feed for animals, for production of biofuel as well as manufacturing of industrial products like starch, syrup, alcohol, acetic acid and lactic acid. In Ethiopia, maize has been growing from moisture stress areas to high rainfall areas and from lowlands to highlands of the country. At national level around 2.01 million ha of land was covered by maize with 6.2 million t of total production (CSA., 2012). From this total maize production of the country, 0.56 million t was obtained in the west Gojam zone of Amhara region but now a day due to the current global climate change these maize growing areas were commonly experienced with terminal moisture stress as well as uneven distribution of rain fall. As a result, long maturing maize varieties had showed inconsistence and low grain yielding performance. In a similar fashion, Akcura et al. (2011) reported that changes of environmental conditions aggravate the effect of genotype environment interaction that often hampers the identification of high yielding 1