Productivity of Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa L.) Genotypes Across Different Agro-Ecological Regions of Oman

Abstract

Background: Quinoa has the great potentiality of its expansion in world agriculture owing to its resilient traits of productivity under marginal conditions across varying altitudes, soil and climatic conditions with extreme levels of abiotic factors like moisture stress, high temperature and salinity as influenced by climatic change. It offers a crop of food security in several countries that have begun the trials of evaluation since the early 1980s leading to the rapid expansion of its cultivation in other countries after the United Nation’s declaration for 2013 as “Year of Quinoa” to promote its production as a grain crop. In this view, five quinoa genotypes were evaluated for their yield, agronomic performance and adaptability at three locations across different agro-ecological regions of Oman. Methods: Five quinoa genotypes Amarilla Marangani, Amarilla Sacaca, Blanca de junin, Kancolla and Salcedo INIA, received from the Oman FAO office in 2016, were evaluated for three consecutive years from 2016/2017 to 2018/2019 during the winter season (October to March) at national agriculture research stations located at Rumais in South Batinah governorate, AlKamil in South Sharqia governorate and Sohar in North Batinah governorate. The experiments were conducted on the sites containing sandy loam soil under Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) involving these five genotypes with four replications under a drip-irrigation system with varying levels of irrigation water salinity. The irrigation and fertilizers were applied as per national recommendations. The characters viz. chlorophyll content, plant height (cm), number of branches, inflorescence length (cm), days to maturity and grain yield (ton/ha) were recorded at appropriate times of growth of crops at all locations. Grain samples were subjected to proximate analysis. The data on yield and yield contributing characters were subjected to multi-factor analysis of variance (ANOVA) using GenStat Statistical Package v12. Results: The results indicated that among the effects of main factors viz. genotypes, locations and years, all the effects were highly significant (p<0.01) in respect of plant height and grain yield, whereas for a number of branches, all the main effects except genotypes were highly significant (p<0.01). In respect of chlorophyll content (SPAD value), effects of genotype and years were found significant (p<0.05) and whereas for inflorescence length, effects of locations and years were highly significant (p<0.05). Genotype Amarllia Sacaca had the highest plant height (135 cm), followed by genotype Salcedo INIA (117 cm) during the winter season of 2016/2017. The highest grain yield of 5.40 t ha-1) obtained was harvested at Agriculture Research Station, Rumais where Amarllia Sacaca produced the highest (8.86 t ha-1). The protein content was highest (17.49%) in the genotype Amarllia Maranagani. Irrespective of genotypes, locations and years, the quinoa crop had acceptable performance in terms of 107.47 cm plant height, 18 number of branches, 44.47 SPDA value (chlorophyll) and 31.96 cm inflorescence length with an average yield of 3.83 t ha-1. Conclusion: Quinoa has been found to be highly adaptable to Northern agro-ecological regions (South and North Batinah Governorates) of Oman, and genotypes evaluated can be successfully introduced for general cultivation in Northern Oman.