Malaysian Journal of Sustainable Agriculture (MJSA)

Salinity remains a major abiotic threat to crop production. The growth and yield performance of five soybean accessions exposed to different salinity levels was evaluated in a pot experiment between July to December 2023 and August to December 2023 at the Screen House of Teaching and Research Station, Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria. The experiment was laid out in a Completely Randomized Design with two factors (accessions and salinity levels) with three replications. The factors were five soybean accessions and five salinity levels (0.64, 2.5, 5.0, 7.5, and 10.0 dS/m). Results obtained indicated that seed emergence percentage, plant height, the number of leaves per plant, number of pods per plant, pod weight (g), and grain yield at 12 percent moisture content were significantly (P>0.05) affected by soil salinity at all levels of treatment and the accessions were significantly different to each other. As the soil salinity concentration increases, the performance of the soybean agronomic traits studied reduces. However, the accessions collected Kujama and Zaria performed better compared to other studied accessions across the salinity levels. The results confirmed the detrimental effects of soil salinity on soybean, and improvement towards salt tolerance can begin with accession from Kujama and Zaria