Prediction of grain yield performance of commercially released finger millet (Eleusine coracana L.) varieties based on single-versus multiple-year BLUPs and YREMs

Breeders effectuate trials to evaluate the performance of the germplasm lines or advanced breeding lines across multiple locations and years to recognize the promising line(s) for commercial cultivation across farmers’ fields. The majority of the theories state that cultivars’ multiple-year data from a specified location has a higher predictive ability of their future performance than single-year data. To verify this hypothesis, we predicted the cultivars’ present performance based on their previous 1- (2020), 2- (2020, 2019), 3- (2020, 2019 and 2018) and 4- (2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017) years’ grain yield performance of 77 commercially released finger millet (Eleusine coracana L.) varieties for cultivation across various cropping zones in India using (best linear unbiased predictors) BLUP and yield relative to environment maximum (YREM). The results indicated that single-year grain yield data had a reduced ability to recognize superior finger millet varieties. Further inclusion of multiple (4 and 3 years) year grain yield data seemed to predict better than single-year grain yield data. The coefficient of determination of 5-year BLUP and YREM with maximum and minimum yearly BLUP and YREM could be used as a yardstick to accept and reject the cultivars, respectively. The varieties VL 204, RAU 8, ML365, RAU 3, VR 708 and L5 depicted high YREM and BLUP estimates with high mean grain yield and, therefore, they can be adapted to Karnataka state and can be recommended to the farmers for cultivation.