PARTICIPATORY SELECTION OF POTATO (Solanum tuberosum L.) VARIETIES IN THE HIGHLAND AREAS OF GUJI ZONE, SOUTHERN ETHIOPIA

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is one of the most important food security and cash crop for farmers in highland parts of Ethiopia, particularly in Guji zone where it s grown by farmers and seed producers abundantly. However, in the highland areas of Guji zone an access, well adapted, résistance to late blight and high yielder potato variety is highly limited. Due to this reason, there is an urgent need to develop and replace the previous underproduction varieties that suit for the area. As a result, an experiment was conducted in the highland areas of Guji Zone at Bore on-station and three farmers’ fields (Abayi kuture, Raya boda, and Bube korsa) during 2019/20 cropping seasonto select and recommend high yielding, and diseases résistance improved potato varieties through participatory variety selection. Six (6) improved potato varieties (Gudanie, Belete, Jalenie, Dagim, Horro, and Bubu) were used as testing crop. The treatments were arranged in randomized completed block design (RCBD) with three replications for mother trial and farmers were used as replication for baby trials. Both agronomic and farmers data were collected based on the recommended standards. Data collected from mother trail were subjected to analysis of variance where as matrix ranking was used for data collected from baby trials. The analysis of variance indicated that significant differences observed at (P≤ 0.05)among the tested Irish potato varieties for day to 50% emergence and flowering, stem number per hill, tuber number per hill, marketable and total tuber yield. However, non-significant difference was observed at (P> 0.05) among the varieties for days to days to 90% maturity, plant height, tuber weight and unmarketable tuber yield. The highest marketable tuber yield was (48.17t/ha) was recorded for Belete followed by Bubu and Gudanie (35.35 and 34.3t/ha) respectively. But, the lowest marketable tuber yield (18.07t/ha) was obtained from improved Dagim variety. In other cases, farmers were allowed to evaluate the varieties using their own criteria. Accordingly, variety Bubu and Gudanie were selected by farmers due to their resistant to disease, stem number, tuber size, tuber color, tuber eye depth, number of tubers and marketability. Therefore, these two improved Irish potato varieties are selected based on agronomic data result and farmers preference and recommended for production to the highland areas of Guji zone.