Genetic Evaluation and Nutritional Study of Baby Corn and Green Ear for Fodder Purpose

Green forages are rich and cheapest source of carbohydrates, protein, vitamins and minerals for dairy animals. To meet out the needs of the ever increasing livestock population the production as well productivity of fodder is to be increased. Maize crop has an important place in the food grain basket of our country and is the third most important versatile food grain crop due to its importance in food, feed, specialty corn, starch etc. In this experiment, twelve inbred lines were crossed with each of five testers in a linextester design to evaluate combining ability and heterosis to identify promising hybrids of green cob and baby corn for fodder purpose with various characters like, 50% tasseling, 50% silking, 75% dry husk, grain yield, no. and weight of green ears, green fodder yield, dry weight, pericarp thickness and various quality parameters. The resulting F(1)s along with three checks and seventeen parents were evaluated in two environments during kharif 2010 and rabi 2010-11. Crosses excelled their perspective parents in performance for most of the traits studied. BQPM-2 among the parental lines and BAUIM-2 among the testers were identified as the best general combiners for grain yield and green fodder yield. Whereas among the hybrids, BAUIM-4xHKI-163 and BQPM-2xHKI-163 were identified as potential cross combinations for grain yield and green fodder yield. However for quality parameters, BQPM-2xBAUIM-2 exhibited the highest magnitude of economic heterosis for calcium, crude fibre, dry ash and reducing sugar contents while for iron and phosphorus contents, BAUIM-4xHKI 163 exhibited the most desirable value of heterosis. So the crosses (BAUIM-4xHKI 163) and (BQPM-2xBAUIM-2) can be utilized for developing high yielding hybrid varieties as well as for exploiting hybrid vigor. While for baby corn as feed for animals, several quality parameters like moisture, calcium, iron, phosphorus, total soluble sugars, crude fibre and dry ash contents) baby corn yield were studied. The inbred line BAUIM-4 followed by BQPM-2 was a good general combiner for all the quality traits and baby corn yield. Single cross BQPM-2 x BAUIM-2 had positive significant specific combining ability effects for all the quality traits and baby corn yield.