Farmer's participatory evaluation of a mosaic resistant cigar-tobacco line

A landrace cigarfiller tobacco variety Vizcaya was improved by incorporating the TMV resistance gene through backcrossing and selection. Five lines in B7S2 generation were evaluated in a preliminary yield trial and one out of the five was evaluated at the same time in a farmer-managed trial using RCBD with four and three replications, respectively. In the farmer-managed trial, each farmer cooperator served as a replicate and planted both the line and its parent. The study aims to compare the agronomic performance of the TMV-resistant Vizcaya line against its recurrent parent in a formal experiment and farmer-managed trial and determine the farmers' response to and the applicability of the participatory approach to tobacco varietal evaluation under local condition. Phenotypically, the TMV-resistant line was already similar to its recurrent parent in crop stand, leaf shape and orientation, and color of the fresh leaves. ANOVA revealed non-significant differences between the line and its parent in plant height, number of leaves, 10th leaf dimensions (width and length), days to first and last primings, yield and crop value on both the formal experiment and farmer-managed trials. The line flowered six days earlier by LSD (5 percent) than its parent in the farmer-managed trial. The three farmer cooperators aimed that the line was similar to its parent but pointed out some subtle differences in characteristics between the two like bigger top leaves, early flowering, and heavier but lesser leaves of the resistant line. The cooperators, some farmers and a private company expressed their interest in planting the line in Crop Year 1997-98. Eighty-three percent of the 43 farmer-repondents randomly chosen from different tobacco growing provinces expressed their willingness to select their preferred variety from the NTA selection blocks and plant them on their own. The farmers' participatory approach to varietal evaluation may be adopted in the tobacco varietal development program