EXPLOITING THE CHARACTERISTICS OF CENTRAL COMPOSITE DESIGN FOR HIGH YIELD OF SORGHUM

Abstract

Sorghum is a nutritious cereal grain with a potential for healthy feeding, regional development and sustainable economies. The World Food Programme (WFP), Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG): Zero hunger, aims at eradicating hunger in the world. Maximizing yield of Sorghum by exploiting the statistical Central Compo-site Design (CCD) characteristics would be attractive in meeting the need to eradicate hanger. This paper fo-cuses on using one Response Surface Methodology (RSM), the CCD to develop a model that is useful in high production of Sorghum in Meru County, Kenya using application of organic and inorganic fertilizers. This

study used nitrogen fertilizer (         ) supplied in form of Calcium Ammonium Nitrate (CAN) 26%, goat manure

(  ) and vegimax folia fertilizer (  ).as the independent variables The data obtained from the study was analyzed using the R statistical software and the output showed that Nitrogen fertilizer, Goat manure and Vegi-max folia were significant at varied levels of significance (p < 0.001, P=0.0485249, and P=0.0096342 respec-tively). All the quadratic functions were significant (p-values < 0.05) but the factor interactions were all insig-nificant (p-value>0.05). The findings indicated that 112 Kg/ha of Nitrogen fertilizer, 12 tons/ha of goat manure and 5.5 ml/20L( of water) of Vegimax folia were the optimum values that lead to maximum sorghum grain yield of 4.95 tons/ha. The Multiple R-squared and Adjusted R-squared were 0.9277 and 0.8627 respectively, an indication that the fitted model explained 92.8% and 86.3% of the variations in the model. The research output will contribute to sustainable livelihoods and economies for transformative societies.