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Abstract

Drought is the major constraint for sorghum production in Ethiopia causing high yield loses every year. However, there were no more sorghum varieties developed and released in Ethiopia that can highly adapt drought stress and perform well in moisture stress areas. Therefore, developing and using drought tolerant or resistant sorghum varieties is one of the available solutions to cope with the effects of drought. The objectives of this study were to evaluate promising sorghum genotypes for drought tolerance and other agronomic traits. A total of 42 sorghum genotypes were evaluated in an alpha-lattice design with two replications in 2019 main cropping season at Mieso and Kobo. The combined analysis of variance revealed that there was a highly significant difference (p<0.01) among the genotypes for all the traits. Among the tested genotypes, the top better performing genotypes were 4x14 (6.32 tha^-1) followed by genotype 8x15(5.92 tha^-1), 1x15 (5.88 tha^-1), 13x14 (5.78 tha^-1) and 6x15 (5.57 tha^-1) with a yield advantage of 32.49%, 24%, 23%, 21% and 16.68% over the check (ESH4) (4.77 tha^-1), respectively. The sorghum genotypes showed substantial genetic variation for studied traits under drought stress condition and could be utilized by sorghum breeders to develop new and economically important sorghum varieties. Finally, the study identified the most promising and potential genotypes which could be exploited commercially after critical evaluation for their superiority and yield stability across the locations over years.