Forage Pearl Millet: Issues and Strategies for Genetic Improvement

Pearl Millet [Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.] is an important dual-purpose crop, where grain is consumed as a staple food or food supplement, and stover or green biomass is used for livestock feeding. In India, it is popularly known as Bajra or bajri. It has several desirable attributes like tolerance to heat and moisture stress, good nutritional quality, and high mineral content and hence widely cultivated in drier parts of India and the world. Several popular fodder varieties have been developed in the past utilizing breeding tools like composites, recurrent selection, and targeted hybridization. Being highly cross-pollinated, it is difficult to maintain the genetic purity of a variety. Targeted breeding efforts have resulted in a series of new multi-cut forage pearl millet under the irrigated condition which is now becoming popular in the southern and central part of India because of its high yield, nutritive quality, and providing green fodder during the lean period in 2–3 cuts. Exploiting the gene pool of the agamic complex of Pennisetum, attempts have been made with varying degrees of success to introgress several desired traits in the pearl millet cultivars to make it more adaptable and highly productive with better nutritive quality. Successful bispecific and trispecific hybrids in different combinations have been reported using the species such as P. violaceum, P. squamulatum, P. orientale, and P. purpureum. Traits like perenniality, multi-cut nature, improved quality, and apomictic components have been introgressed in pearl millet. The future pearl millet improvement program should concentrate on developing biofortified forage or dual-type varieties with resistance to important diseases like downy mildew and blast. Multi-cut with improved quality will be an added advantage to make it more acceptable across different agro-climatic zones of the country.