Behaviour of sweet cassava genotypes within Distrito Federal of Brazil

Abstract

The market of sweet cassava presents potential to expand within Distrito Federal (DF), due to the increasing consumption market, the high rentability and the tradition of the producers. The aim of the present work was to evaluate the behaviour of sweet cassava genotypes in what concerns root yield (RY) and time for cooking the roots (TC), within DF. The experiments were performed in the agricultural harvests 1999/2000 and 2000/2001 in six locations at DF. Eleven sweet cassava genotypes were evaluated on a randomized block design with three replications and three common witnesses. The data of RY and TC, obtained in the harvest performed at 10 months post planting the six experiments, were submitted to analysis of group and individual variance and to the Tukey average comparison test. The analysis of group variance revealed significant influence of the factor harvest upon the RY and the TC, what shows strong effect of this factor upon these characters. When considering together the RY and the TC of all evaluated sweet cassava genotypes in all the locations and harvests, the performance of the genotype BGMC 982 (also known as Iapar 19 or Pioneira) was the best, since it was the most productive one among all the evaluation locations in every harvest, presenting RY varying between 34.03 t ha^-1 and 53.12 t ha^-1 and TC varying between 14.33 min and 19 min.