Risco de recomendação de cultivares de feijão-caupi no Brasil

Abstract

In Brazil, cowpea is currently produced in an area covering 1.39 million hectares, expressively concentrated in the Northeast region. However, the state of Mato Grosso is the largest national producer. The recommendation of a cultivar that can be adopted in different environments and production systems is one of the great challenges and objectives of any breeding program, since the costs involved in conducting experiments are high. Quantifying the interaction between genotypes and environemnts of elite strains and estimating the risk in the recommendation of the new cultivars is of fundamental importance. Therefore, the objective of this work was to quantify the contribution of the interaction between lineages and environments and to identify lineages with lower risk of recommendation for the largest possible number of environments. Cowpea yield data were obtained from the assessment of variety value for cultivation and use (VCU) composed of 15 elites and five controls, distributed in 59 environments from the North, Northeast, Center - East and Southeast of Brazil. The experiments were conducted according to the standards of the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply (MAPA). In order to estimate the risk of the recommendation, the averages of the lines in each environment were standardized. The interaction of lineages x environments was significant in the regions that grow cowpea in Brazil. Furthermore, it was possible to discriminate the lineages that have the lowest risk in the recommendation. Lineage L31 was above the average in many environments. Besides its good architecture, its grain aspects can meet the demand of the domestic market and for exportation.