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YAM cultivation has always occupied a prestigious position In our traditional agricultural practice inspite of the increasing production of maize and cassava. This is so because a farmer's position in the community is assessed by the lines of yams in his barn. It is therefore very necessary to encourage yam cultivation as it is very widely grown in the Southern and Middle-belt areas of Nigeria where it traditionally forms the main staple.
The importance of yams in the Nigerian society has not diminished, rather yam has increasingly become a rare and costly food stuff. This may be due to the increasing number of yam eaters, decreasing number of producers and high labour costs, but the most important factor is the very high cost of seed yams and the inability of the producers to obtain them easily and cheaply.
One of the major tasks undertaken by the National Root Crops Production Company Limited is to assist in producing large quantities of seed-yams and making them available to farmers at cheap rate. This involves the use of the Rapid Multiplication Technique which was developed by the National Root Crops Research Institute at Umudike. The National Root Crops Production Company has tried out at field scale this Rapid Yam Multiplication Method with four Dioscorea rotundata (white-yam) cultivare namely Nwopoko, Osekpe, Nkwocha and Obiaturugo. These cultivare have been Identified with high yields, good external and internal qualities and excellent flavour and cooking qualities. They also store well. There are yet many more cultivare to be tried out for desirable characteristics. It might be possible in future to determine more accurately, from comparative yield trials, the geographical and ecological areas of the country in which these proven cultivare perform best.
In the Rapid Multiplication Technique,...