Screening and Evaluation of Forage Sorghum Cultivars for Forage Production Using Multi-Criterion Decision Analysis Atif Elsadig Idris and Hassan Ibrahim Mohammed; Screening and Evaluation of Forage Sorghum Cultivars for Forage Production Using Multi-Crite

ABSTRACT Studies were carried out to estimate the extent of variability in forage sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench) genotypes developed by individual plant selection among the land race cultivar " Abu Sab'in " . Five exotic cytoplasm male sterile lines and four fertile local inbred lines of forage sorghum were evaluated during seasons 2002 and 2003. across three environments (locations : Shambat 1, Shambat 2 and Omdoum ), to obtain information on genetic and morphological diversity. The experiment was laid out in a randomized complete block design with three replications. Fourteen different agronomic and quality traits were measured including yield, quality and growth traits. The results obtained indicated that significant differences (P 0.05) were observed between genotypes and genotypes × location interaction for most of the combined traits in the studied lines. These nine lines exhibited high phenotypic and genotypic variances for most of the traits. Significant mean squares were obtained for almost all traits in the individual analysis of variance as well as the combined analysis across environments, suggesting that, this sorghum population was highly variable for almost all the traits, therefore, would respond to selection. Cultivar performances estimated by compromise programming technique. This technique of multi-objective criteria ranked the cultivars in descending order of preference as: , Leaf to stem ratio, and Shoot to root ratio. With respect to all decisionmakers the cultivar IS.9830 is always ranked as first choice, while the cultivar KEN16.A ranked as least preferred three times by Economist, farmer, and agronomist and as next to the last by animal specialist and with equal weights. Individual and the combined analyses indicated that most characters had higher genotypic and phenotypic variance components than the environmental variance estimates, which is indicative that character expression in this sorghum population was genetic and can be exploited in breeding programs