Abstract:
Wheat is among the highly consumed serials in Kenya therefore playing a major role inthe livelihoods of many households in terms of food security and employment. Currentlyere is a huge deficit of wheat being produced in Kenya and the consumption of thethame. Wheat productivity has for a long period of time been adversely affected by ansarray of factors, including drought, insects-pests and diseases. Stem rust currently posesthe greatest threat in wheat production. In this study we have evaluated twenty five wheatvarieties in consideration to their yield and resistance to stem rust. Thus the mainobjective of our study was to determine the best performing wheat variety in a wheat varietyrial conducted at Kenya Agricultural Reearch Institute (KARl), Njoro in the presence oftstem rust. The varieties were grown in a live by five simple partially balanced incompleteblock design and in three replicates. We analysed the varieties significance by use ofanalysis of variance CANOV A).The varieties that were found to have the highest adjustedtreatment means were therefore declared the best performing varieties. Variety t3 was thebest variety with a mean yield of 51.67 tonnes per hectare. We also found that the bestother five varieties are t2, t4, t18, t20 tl4 Results also revealed that there were significantmean differences in yield among the wheat varieties at 5% significance level. Thevarieties that did not show a significant difference in the mean yield should be subjectedto further improvement and test in the future and thus we would advise farmers to avoidhem meanwhiIe.t
