Improvement of Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) Productivity using Selected Carrier-based Rhizobial Biofertilizers at Dendi District, Central Highlands of Ethiopia.

Abstract

This study anticipated assessing the productivity enhancement effect of selected native rhizobial inoculants on chickpea on camber bed settings at Ginchi sub-station; Dendi districts, central highlands of Ethiopia during 2019-21The trials were laid in RCBD by triplications with a plot size of 12m2. The two-year’s average result showed a statistically significant difference among treatments (p ≤ 0.05) in aboveground biomass at the early podding stage and grain yield. The uppermost average grain yields (2286.4 and 2283.8 kg/ ha) were gotten from inoculation of rhizobial inoculants CP-26 and CP-41 during the 2019/20 and 2020/21 cropping seasons, respectively. The partial economic analysis results also showed that CP-26 and CP-41 were superlatively hopeful inoculants that exhibited a high marginal rate of return of 8683% and 8642%, which are 86.3% and 85.9% higher than the marginal rate of return of the local standard check CP-17, respectively. Therefore, inoculants CP-26 and CP-41 can be considered the best candidates for developing promising chickpea inoculants for Dendi heavy clay soil and similar agroclimatic conditions of Ethiopia after having appropriate validation work.