**3.7 Seed production technology**

The quality seed production of grasses is a challenging task for the breeders and agronomist. The major constraint in development of pasture is supply of inadequate, poor quality seed. In our country, the requirement of tropical range grasses and legumes is about 3000 t/year whereas the supply is only about 450 t/year having a very large gap between demand and supply. Many problems are associated with the grass seed production. Very low effort has been made to develop the high yielding grass varieties. It has also been noticed that the high fodder yielding varieties are very poor seed yielder. The maintenance of seed purity is also difficult due to its perennial nature and tussock making habit. The seed maturity in sewan grass is unsynchronized. The seed production is vulnerable to adverse weather conditions i.e. windstorms, rainfall, drought etc. It has been noticed that the high wind velocity leads to the mature seeds to fall on the ground and occasional heavy rainfall destroy the seeds. The occurrence of drought or moisture scarcity results in lower seed production. Under these circumstances, seed production opportunity and its exploration are very poor, which restricts popularization of sewan seed production among the farmers. Due to the unsynchronized maturity, it takes seven to ten days for all the spikelet to mature in normal season and it may extend up to 20 days in cooler months [31]. As per Indian Minimum Seed Certification Standards


#### **Table 2.**

*Soil-Moisture conservation measures.*


#### **Table 3.**

*Field and Seed standards for Sewan grass (*Lasiurus scindicus*) as per IMSCS.*

(IMSCS), Field and seed standards for identification, release sewan grass cultivars are mentioned in **Table 3**.

### **3.8 Seed collection**

Different methods have been applied to collect sewan grass seed with less effort:


maturity called traditional method. The results revealed that mean seed germination percentage of October and November harvests was at par in both the methods while in March harvest this was almost double to the traditional method. However, germination was more in the seed harvest of traditional method. Hence modified method is less labor intensive and cost effective [22].

c.In the forest areas, seed is collected manually from the ground, these seeds have very poor germination percentage due to damage caused by ants. Hand collection as per maturity seed provides quality seed of good germination.
