Grain moisture content is a key indicator of an appropriate harvest period of seeds on the field and could also be used to effectively stabilize cereal products especially when physical attributes is to be evaluated. This study evaluated effect of time of harvest at different moisture contents on seed yield attributes of ten pigeon pea genotypes. The ten pigeon pea genotypes used for the experiment were sourced from International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. The field experiment was a Randomized Completely Block Design (RCBD) with three replications. The seeds were harvested at maturity on the field at 12, 15 and 17 % moisture content. At each harvested moisture content, the following seed yield parameters were evaluated periodically on five observational plants from each net plot-; number of pods per plant, number of seeds/pod, seed yield/plant, pod weight /plant, 100 seed weight/plot and seed production efficiency. Data collected were subjected to analysis of variance and Principal component analysis was used to identify characters that contributed majorly to variation within the genotypes under each treatment. The result showed that NSWCC-18b, NSWCC-19 and NSWCC-18 had an outstanding performance in the entire seed- yield attributes, evaluated for various moisture contents and could therefore, be used as dependable genotypes in pigeon pea seed development programme. It is thereby, recommended that, pigeon pea seeds should be harvested at 15% moisture content for effective maintenance of quality, quantity and vigor.
Key words: Seed moisture content, optimal harvest timing, seed quality, pigeon pea, seed vigor
|
