TITLE:
Participatory Assessment of the Potential of Traditional Lowland Rainfed Rice Varieties in Lower Casamance
AUTHORS:
Milienne Mendy, Ousmane Ndiaye, Bathé Diop, Djibril Sarr, Mohamed Mahamoud Charahabil, Paul Diedhiou, Saliou Ndiaye, Cheikh Tidiane Ba
KEYWORDS:
Rice, Rainfed, Evaluation, Accession, Indland Valleys, Senegal
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Plant Sciences,
Vol.13 No.12,
December
21,
2022
ABSTRACT: Casamance was perceived as an agricultural granary
that had rice potential which could meet
the high food demand of Senegal. Given that the rice-growing lands have
been degraded due to pedoclimatic variabilities, improved modern varieties are
not usually well adapted to the Casamance rice-growing ecosystems. This work
aims to contribute to the increase of rice production through varietal
diversification and enhancement of cultural heritage. A participatory evaluation
of five local farmers’ traditional varieties along with one check was carried out in an experiment laid out in a one-factor complete
randomized block design using the six accessions with five
replications. ANOVA followed by a 5% mean comparison Tukey test and the Kendall
Rate were performed with IBM SPSS Statistics software. The result showed very
significant varietal differences for leaf blade of the penultimate leaves, 100-grains weight, panicle length,
growth cycle, plant height, ramification
of secondary branching of the spikelets, resistance to lodging
and threshing facility (p ≤ 0.005). However, traits
including flag leaf, tiller numbers, sterile tillers number, panicle numbers,
panicle yield, and grain yield did not show a significant difference (p ≥ 0.06)
among varieties. Thus, based on some of these characteristics, farmers selected
their most preferred rice varieties or accessions. The most important characteristics were tillering ability, lodging
resistance and fertility rate. Koussik Emandiouck selected by farmers as
the best variety, had a high grain yield (4.9 t∙ha-1),
higher lodging resistance (9), and higher fertility rate (80.53%). Koussik Emandiouck, Koufekeny and Awandiaho
varieties were the most preferred by farmers.