HERITABILITY AND GENETIC ADVANCE OF YIELD AND YIELD RELATED TRAITS IN WINTER FEED BARLEY VARIETIES

A field experiment was conducted at the Institute of Agriculture – Karnobat, Southeastern Bulgaria in three growing seasons. Twenty barley varieties were laid out in a complete block design with 4 replications. Variability, heritability and genetic advance for yield-related traits and grain yield were studied. There were significant differences among varieties for all studied traits including grain yield. Heritability in broad sense ranged from 10.10% for grain yield to 94.60% for spike length. High heritability estimates and genetic advance as percent of mean was computed for spike length and 1000 grain weight. Besides, genotypic coefficient of variance and phenotypic coefficient of variance had low differences for these characters. Therefore, these traits could be easily improved by selection. Grain yields of the check varieties Veslets and Izgrev were 5.27 t/ha and 5.09 t/ha, respectively. The varieties that performed better than the checks for grain yield were PA86-49-95 (6.43 t/ha), Bojin (6.01 t/ha), and Express (5.90 t/ha). Hence, using these varieties in the breeding program of winter feed barley could lead to the improvement of grain yield.