Morphological Evaluation of Arabica Coffee Resulted from Three Way Cross Method

Abstract

Breeding for high yielding, pest, and disease resistant, and good quality arabica coffee is the direction of the coffee breeding program in Indonesia. Three-way cross-breeding method becomes the alternative method to improve plant genetics to achieve those goals. This research was aimed to evaluate the agronomic performance and grouping of Arabica coffee genotypes from three-way cross progeny. This study was conducted in Andungsari Experimental Station, Bondowoso, East Java from July until September 2021. A randomized complete block design with three replications was used as an experimental design. It consisted of eight Arabica genotypes resulting from three-way cross method and one check variety (Andungsari 1) as treatments. The results of the agronomic performance evaluation showed that TWC2 ((S 1934/AB 3 x AB 3) x AB 3) and TWC3 (CR/ S 795 x Catimor) had good agronomic characteristics i.e. weight of 100 cherry (190.73-203.03 g) and cherry weight per tree (646.1-689.4 g). While grouping using heatmap clustering method showed that there were three groups of genotypes. One of the groups which consisted of TWC1, TWC2, and TWC5 were categorized as moderate yield group.