Ethiopia: Improved Sorghum Varieties a Solution to Persistent Drought

Posted on :Friday , 20th January 2017

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) is considered as one of the potential crop to alleviate the challenges of recurrent drought in Ethiopia.

Since the inception of sorghum research in Ethiopia considerable achievements have been obtained in developing early maturing and/or drought tolerant sorghum varieties and production managements practices nationally and regionally.

Currently, a total of 20 open pollinated varieties and four hybrids have been registered for production targeting the dry lowland sorghum growing environments. The released varieties have a yield potential of 40 to 60 quintal per hectare, which are two to three fold higher from the national average yield.

However, there has been limited adoption rate of the improved varieties mainly due to lower biomass production of these varieties in comparison to the land races. In order to address the demand for food, feed and fuel farmers predominantly prefer to grow the long maturing sorghum land races in the majority of dry lowland sorghum growing areas of the country, which requires more than seven months to reach maturity.

The disruption of onset of rainfall and extended moisture stress occurring between the short and main rain season (May and June), however, imposes a serious challenge to plant the late maturing land races in April.

In the past few years drought occurred in every two or three years which resulted a total failure in the late types of sorghum land races. In particular, the 2015/16 cropping season drought stress inflicted a total crop failure in the major lowland sorghum growing areas of the country. The released early maturing sorghum varieties have the capacity to escape and/or resist terminal drought stress. Integration of moisture conservation practices such as tied ridge with the improved sorghum varieties could be a better strategy to overcome the risks associated to drought stress.

Despite the crop failure around Mieso area occurred in the 2015/16 cropping season, the on-farm seed multiplication activity aiming to create access to farmers of the improved varieties and research activities conducted in the sub-station accentuated the potential of the improved early types of sorghum varieties and moisture management practices to address food security problem of the area. Farmers participated in the community based seed multiplication activity produced more than 110 qt quality seed of the recently released sorghum I varieties Melkam and Dekeba.

A ﬁeld day was organized in the presence of EIAR deputy director general and crop research director which created impression among all participants. Following this the activities were visited by the director general of EIAR and higher government ofﬁcial and directions have been given to multiply the seed in all possible ways and further scale up the technology to many farmers.

Taking this into account, the produced seed were sold with a premium price of 850 birr per quintal for the union in west Hararghe to be distributed to farmers and by the national programme for seed multiplication and demonstration purposes. Because of the crop failure, it is expected that seed shortage may occur in the 2016 main season in most of drought stricken areas of the country.

Considering this and the increasing demand of the improved early types of sorghum varieties seed multiplication activity has been undertaken at Melkawere and Mehoni research cantres. In addition, in the upper Awash agro industry multiplication of the variety Teshale has been underway with a close supervision of the ﬁeld and seed quality by the national sorghum improvement programme.

A total of 200 quital of seed is expected to be produced which requires follow up and intervention to purchase the seed and distribute to farmers who are in need of the improved seed for the coming main season. The traditional way of growing sorghum in drought prone areas needs strategic approach to address both the food and feed demand of farmers. Since there is a clear demand for both food grain and animal feed any technological intervention should have to address the multiple demands of farmers.

Experience have showed that areas which receive bi-modal rainfall farmers should not have to take the risk of crop failure by planting the long maturing sorghum in all the sorghum ﬁelds. Dividing the land for sorghum into half and planting the local land races and early maturing varieties in the main season could help to address both the food and feed demands.

Planting of early maturing legumes such as cowpea and mungbean during the short rain season and planting sorghum in the main season could have multiple beneﬁt including food security, nutritional security, increased income, maintaining soil fertility and feed for their cattle.

Promising result has been obtained with the double cropping approach and on-farm demonstration and research work are underway to investigate the best combination in different scenario. The effect of drought and the success of this year community based seed multiplication ignite farmer's interest to be involved on the seed multiplication and demonstration of the improved technologies.

Demand has been created for the variety Melkam and Teshale including the hybrid ESH-1 in Eastern and Western Hararghe, North Shoa, North Wello, North west Tigray though pre-extension demonstration activities conducted in collaboration with the regional research centres. Hence, it is high time to have a coordinated effort to create access and scale up the early maturing sorghum varieties integrated with moisture conservation practices.

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