Developing Maize (Zea Mays L.) For Fresh Maize Production In Southeastern Nigeria

ABSTRACT 

Green (fresh) maize (Zea mays L.) provides food security and income to farmers especially when other crops are still in the field. However, research on green maize variety is scarcely reported in literature or information on suitable genetic material (germplasm) for green maize production. Developing maize for fresh maize production in the southeastern Nigeria was carried out in the Center for Agricultural Research, School of Agriculture and Agricultural Technology, Federal University of Technology, Owerri using two local maize collected from southeastern Nigeria and five improved varieties collected from International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA). These seven (7) inbred lines were crossed in a half diallel mating system in randomized complete block design (RCBD) with four replications. Data collected were subjected to statistical analysis for effective comparison with the F1 that resulted from the second season. The second experiment, evaluation of the hybrid resulting from the crossing of the seven genotypes in the first experiment was laid out in RCBD with four replications. Data collected were subjected to analysis of variance and those found significant (P = 0.05) were further subjected to diallel analysis using Griffing’s method II and model I for fixed effects. There were significant differences between the entries for the measured traits. Mean Mid – parent heterosis (MPH) ranged from 1.35% for plant height to 90.51% for number of grain per cob and Better – parent heterosis (BPH) from 2.09% for days to 50% silking to 96.42 for number of grains per cob. All the crosses exhibited positive MPH and BPH except for plant at harvest that exhibited negative heterosis. The broad sense heritability estimate was low to high (28.82% - 89.53%) in the most of the studied agronomic attributes; plant stands, days to 50% emergence, days to 50% tasseling, days to 50% silking, plant height, leaf area, ear height, stem girth, days to maturity, plant at harvest, cob length, number of rows/cob, number of grains/cob, grain weight/cob, field weight, grain yield indicating that about 28 – 89% of total phenotypic variations are heritable. The hybrids performed almost twice better than their parents and V1 X V7, V6 X V7, V3 X V7, V4 X V7 and V2 X V7 were identified as the best developed maize genotypes for fresh maize production. The use of reciprocal recurrent selection is hereby proposed to further increase the concentration of useful genes in these identified maize genotypes and chemical evaluation to study the levels of essential amino acids in them. 

Keywords: Genotypes, Maize, fresh, Southeastern Nigeria.