Noug: the dominant oil crop on vertisols in the highlands of Ethiopia
2001
Adefris Teklewold | Bulcha Weyesa (EARO, Addis Abeba (Ethiopia))
Noug or nigerseed [Guizotia abyssinica (L.f) Cass.] forms the main stay of the Ethiopian vegetable oil production. Noug is largely cultivated on vertisol where water logging is a major problem and most crops and all other oil crops fall to grow. It requires oxygen levels less than what has been termed optimum for normal growth. Unlike the other crops, oilseed production continues to be exposed to vagaries of low input, which resulted in extremely low per hectare yield. Though productivity of noug is low, it remains to be a major component of the vertisol farming system of the resource-poor small holder farmers due to its marked feature of adaptation to marginal and water logged soils and low-input. The inception of research on noug could be traced back to the year1941, although the establishment of the Institute of Agricultural Research in 1966 gave a momentum to improved varieties with their matching production technologies were developed. Fertilizer, which was once considered less important, did rather positively affect noug productivity. However, noug doesn't show proportionate partitioning to seed yield which increased application of N fertilizer (30kg/ha). Generally the research effort made in the past has led to formulate some suggestive recommendations to increase productivity of noug. Nevertheless the production of noug still remained to be exposed to low input. Hence, a substantial progress is made towards developing genotypes suitable for low input environment.
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This bibliographic record has been provided by Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research