SEED.REGENERATION IN PEARL MILLET

Abstract

Pearl millet is a highly cross pollinated crop. Due to lack of space for
maintaining perfect isolation distance (1000 m) during the main 'cropping
season, seed regeneration of several varieties and populations of pearl millet can
be undertaken by planting each population in large plots (>2500 m2
) in square
fields, discarding the border rows of 6-8 m on all the 4 sides followed by grid
mass selection to represent equally all the component genotypes in the
population. This system not only maintains mean performance of the
populations with much ease but reduces possible genetic losses that may be
caused by cooler climate, unidirectional winds representing unfavourable and a
typical environment in the off-season.