Assessing Forage Potential of the Global Collection of Finger Millet (Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertn.) Germplasm Conserved at the ICRISAT Genebank

Abstract

Finger millet is an important drought-tolerant and grain-nutrient dense food crop grown in semi-arid regions in Asia and Africa. The forage is used as a source of dry roughage for feeding livestock. In this study, the finger millet diversity panel (310 accessions and four controls) representing the global collection of the finger millet germplasm conserved at the ICRISAT gene bank was assessed for forage quality and diversity in the years 2018 and 2019. Results of the study suggested that finger millet can generate stover yield ranging from 2890 to 10,779 kg ha−1. Finger millet forage contained 6.47% to 8.15% of crude protein, >90% of dry matter content, 11.47% to 14.17% of ash content, 62.36% to 67.73% of neutral detergent fiber (NDF), 33.07% to 38.37% of acid detergent fiber (ADF), 3.95% to 4.80% of acid detergent lignin (ADL), 6.18% to 6.89% of metabolizable energy (ME) and 45.21% to 49.09% of in vitro organic matter digestibility (IVOMD) with the grain yield of 810 to 3698 kg ha−1 at maturity stage. The per se performance between the races, regions, and biological status has been performed and differed significantly for important traits. The 314 accessions were grouped into five clusters based on the performance for food-feed traits. Except for crude protein, there was a positive relationship between forage quality-positive traits and grain yield, indicating that agronomic and forage quality traits could be improved simultaneously. The top 10 performing accessions for important forage quality traits and accessions with multiple forage quality traits were identified. This study provides a detailed understanding of the variability that exists in forage quality traits in crop residues and their association with agronomic traits in the finger millet germplasm. The identified top-performing accessions would be the key genetic resources for developing dual-purpose cultivars and the information from this study will be useful for future finger millet food-feed trait improvement.

Straw dry matter yield and quality of finger millet intercropped with selected vetch species at different seeding ratios in western Oromia, Ethiopia

“…Among the treatment combinations, the numerically highest ME of finger millet straw (8.54 MJ kg −1 ) was recorded when 25% Finger millet was intercropped with 75% Vicia atropurpurea. ME obtained in the current study was higher than the findings of Backiyalakshmi et al. (2021) who reported 6.18%–6.89% in the assessment of forage potential of the Global collection of finger millet germplasm conserved at the ICRISAT genebank.…”

“…Among the treatment combinations, the numerically highest ME of finger millet straw (8.54 MJ kg À1 ) was recorded when 25% Finger millet was intercropped with 75% Vicia atropurpurea. ME obtained in the current study was higher than the findings of Backiyalakshmi et al (2021) who reported 6.18%-6.89% in the assessment of forage potential of the Global collection of finger millet germplasm conserved at the ICRISAT genebank. The difference could be attributed to the cropping system (cereal-legume intercropping), the variety of finger millet used, soil nutrient, rainfall amount and pattern, and other macro and microenvironments.…”

Phenotypic diversity among finger millet (Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertn.) landraces of Nepal

“…Observations on ear shape with droopy, open, compact and semi-compact suggested the presence of all cultivated races (elongata, plana, compacta and vulgaris) of E. coracana ssp. coracana (Upadhyaya et al, 2006;Bharathi, 2011;Sood et al, 2019;Backiyalakshmi et al, 2021). Our observations for other qualitative traits were similar as in core and mini- core collections of global accessions (Upadhyaya et al, 2010), in Sri Lankan accessions (Dasanayaka and Kaluthanthri, 2017;Kumari et al, 2018), in north-west Indian accessions (Kumar et al, 2019) and in global collections from ICRISAT (Malambane and Jaisil, 2015).…”

“…Descriptive statistics such as range, mean and CV of various quantitative variables suggested wide variability within 300 accessions of the Nepalese collection. Mean flowering data ranged from 75 to 140 days which was narrower than in the global collections which included wild species (41-164 days) (Bharathi, 2011) but wider than in the core collection (51-96 days), the minicore subsets (51-93 days) (Upadhyaya et al, 2010) and in a global collection of 314 accessions (51-97 days) (Backiyalakshmi et al, 2021). Since our research was conducted at higher altitudes, we observed mean flowering time of 112 days (pooled mean of three sites) which is higher than in studies conducted at lower elevations, which reported 79 days (Bhattarai et al, 2014), 89 days (Bastola et al, 2015) and 74 days (Backiyalakshmi et al, 2021).…”

“…Mean flowering data ranged from 75 to 140 days which was narrower than in the global collections which included wild species (41-164 days) (Bharathi, 2011) but wider than in the core collection (51-96 days), the minicore subsets (51-93 days) (Upadhyaya et al, 2010) and in a global collection of 314 accessions (51-97 days) (Backiyalakshmi et al, 2021). Since our research was conducted at higher altitudes, we observed mean flowering time of 112 days (pooled mean of three sites) which is higher than in studies conducted at lower elevations, which reported 79 days (Bhattarai et al, 2014), 89 days (Bastola et al, 2015) and 74 days (Backiyalakshmi et al, 2021). Our range for average plant height (61-119cm) was narrower compared to the range of 23-155cm observed in a much larger sample (537) of Nepalese accessions (Bhattarai et al, 2014), 55-240cm in east African accessions (Reddy et al, 2009), 84-143cm in a global collection (Backiyalakshmi et al, 2021) and 45-180cm in a global composite collection of 1,000 accessions (Bharathi, 2011), but wider than the range of 73-113cm in the mini-core collection (Upadhyaya et al, 2010).…”