Tesfaye Balemi
Potato has higher phosphorus requirement for optimum growth and yield. One option to sustain productivity on soil poor in P availability is to use P-efficient genotypes/cultivars. Thus, a pot experiment was conducted in growth chamber to screen genotypes for P efficiency. To meet the objective, 20 potato genotypes were grown in soil under two P levels, 100 mg kg-1 soil (low P) and 700 mg P kg-1 soil (high P). Treatments were arranged in RCB design with 6 replications. Almost for all genotypes, high P level increased shoot dry matter yield, relative growth rate of shoot, shoot P concentration and total P uptake. The shoot dry matter yield ranged from 924.8 mg plant-1 for genotype 1 to 21.3 mg plant-1 for genotype 20 while RGR varied from 1.26 g g-1 day-1 for genotype 12 to 0.08 g g-1 day-1 for genotype 20 at low P level. Shoot P concentration was weakly correlated with shoot dry matter yield (R2 = 0.33) while total P uptake showed significant positive correlation with shoot dry matter yield (R2 = 0.94). Results revealed that genotypes 12, 11, 10, 3 16, 13, 1 and 4 were P-efficient whereas genotypes 9, 2,7,19,17,18, 8,14,15 and 20 were Pinefficient in terms of both shoot dry matter yield and relative growth rate at low P level.
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