Bottle gourd Standl. is one of the most important, widely cultivated popular winter vegetables in Bangladesh. But it is cultivated around the tear due to its taste and demand to the consumers. It occupies an area of about 7217 ha with a total production of 85,267 tons. The average yield is only 11.81 tons per hectare, which is very low as compared to that in other tropical countries. Though a large number of farmers are using their local varieties/cultivars, most of them lost their potentiality due to its cross-pollinated nature. Besides this, limited progressive farmers also using commercial hybrid varieties viz., Dalisa, Barsha etc., but these hybrid varieties are not available to the farmers due to high price. Thus a well-planned and dynamic bottle gourd breeding research programme is needed to meet the required demand of bottle gourd production. Furthermore hybrid varieties may play a vital role in satisfying the interest of producers and consumers. The understanding of the nature and magnitude of gene action is an important factor in developing an effective breeding programme. The diallel analysis provides an efficient means of rapidly obtaining an overall picture of the genetic control of a character in a set of parents in the early generations. In Bangladesh context, the information on this aspect of bottle gourd is not sufficient. This study would be very important in developing hybrid varieties for Bangladesh agricultural conditions. Therefore, the present investigation was undertaken to investigate the genetic architecture of yield in bottle gourd.

The values of mean sum of square for both GCA  and SCA  were highly significant for yield per hectare, which suggests the presence of both additive and non-additive genetic variance in the population . But the higher magnitude of GCA compared to SCA indicated predominance of additive genetic variance. The GCA component is primarily a function of the additive genetic variance. GCA of parents plays a significant role in the choice of parents. A parent with higher positive significant GCA effects is considered as a good general combiner for yield. The magnitude and direction of the significant effects for the five parents provide meaningful comparisons and would give indications to the future breeding programme. The components of variation along with the derived genetic ratios for fruit yield  showed that the D and H components, which measure additive and dominance variation, respectively were significant. This indicated the importance of both additive and dominance components for the inheritance of all the genotypes in bottle gourd. However,hydroponic equipment the magnitude of dominance was higher than the additive component. These results agree with that reported by. The H2 representing dominance deviation due to relative frequency of positive and negative genes was significant. The proportion of positive effects as indicated by F value was non-significant for fruit yield, suggesting greater frequency of dominant alleles governing this character. The net dominance effect, obtained by the estimate h2 expressed as the algebraic sum over all loci in heterozygous condition in all crosses, was significant. This revealed that substantial contribution of dominance effects was due to heterogeneity of loci. The environmental component E, exhibited non-significant values, indicating no influence of environmental factors in the expression. However, the magnitude of E was definitely lower due to no value than the respective value of D and H1. This also indicated that the characters were influenced less by the environment. The average degree of dominance as indicated by the proportion 1/2 was more than unity, suggesting that over dominance was operating in the expression for fruit yield of bottle gourd. and also found over-dominance in graphic analysis. The ratio of H2/4H1 provides an estimate of the average frequency of positive and negative alleles in all the parents. A value of this ratio smaller than 0.25 studied suggested asymmetrical distribution of only the negative alleles.

The ratio of estimates the relative proportion of dominant and recessive alleles in the parents. In the present study the ratio for all the characters were greater than unity, suggesting excess of dominant alleles and minority of recessive alleles i.e., asymmetrical distribution for dominant alleles in the parents. The estimated number of effective factors  was less than unity for all the attributes studied. The proportion of genes or group of genes showing dominance was very less, which could be owing to the predominant concealing effects of positive and negative effects of genes or to non-isodirectional distribution of polygene. Heritability in narrow sense was higher for fruit yield, indicating that this character was highly heritable. These results agree with that reported by. Graphical analysis of parent-offspring covariances  on array variances  is shown in Figure 1. It was observed from the Wr/Vr graph that the slope of the regression line for fruit yield was significantly below 1.0 , suggesting significant non-allelic interaction for this character. The regression line intersected the Wr axis above the origin, suggested incomplete dominance to partial dominance in addition to the interaction. Here all the Wr, Vr points lay within the boundary of the limiting parabola. The relative values of Wr and Vr showed that the parent P4, P5 had the lowest value and hence contained the most dominant alleles while the parent P3 had the highest Wr, Vr values and have the most recessive alleles. The other parents fell in between suggested that the equal frequency of dominant and recessive alleles. All the Wr, Vr points were fall within the boundary of the limiting parabola and here the parents also clustered into two distinct groups on the regression line showing diversity in the parents for this trait. Tomato  is one of the most important vegetables of Bangladesh and the world wide, too. It is the second most important world consumable vegetable after potato, ranks first among the processing crops andbelongs to Solanaceae family. It is rich in a plethora of natural antioxidants and bioactive compounds. The regular ingestion of an adequate amount of fresh tomatoes or processed tomato products has been inversely correlated with the development of widespread human diseases and with an increase in plasma lipid peroxidation levels. This protective effect has been mainly attributed to the carotenoid constituents of the fruits, particularly lycopene and β-carotene which act as antioxidants in detoxifying free radicals. reported that both fresh and processing tomatoes constitute significant amounts within produced vegetable crops.

In addition to the large production values, the tomato is an important source of antioxidant intake. The essential phytonutrients found in the tomato fruit are lycopene, β-carotene, α-tocopherol, polyphenols and ascorbic acid, and antioxidant activity depends on cultivar, environmental parameters, method of production and processing. The ripe tomatoes have important outside quality characteristics: uniform size, red colour and good aroma and texture but these external qualities are not reflecting perfectly the nutritional content. However, Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute has released 21 open-pollinated  and 11 hybrid tomato varieties so far. Several leading seed companies are also supplying some more tomato varieties and seeds which are being imported from different countries. Though the BARI released varieties are higher yielder, some varieties are prone to several pests and diseases. Beside this growers’ demand is good quality summer hybrid varieties. So, growers are interested to get good quality pest and diseases resistant winter and summer tomato varieties having good shelf life. In this context, BARI needs to develop quality tomato varieties having good keeping quality along with higher yield. In 2020, The World Vegetable Centre has supplied 43 tomato advanced lines in two installments. Therefore,mobile grow system an experiment was under taken for assessing horticultural traits and yield potentiality along with local germplasm and varieties in Bangladesh condition to select suitable tomato lines for developing good quality pest and diseases resistant winter and summer tomato varieties having good shelf life.Data on yield and yield attributing parameters with qualitative traits were recorded from 20 inner plants of each plot escaping border plants following WorldVeg guideline. Tomato fruits were started harvesting at breaker stage from 20 inner plant of each treatment. Four to six harvesting was done according to the different germplasm characters and data on days to first harvest, number of flower cluster per plant, number of fruit per cluster, number of fruit per plant, single fruit weight , fruit yield per plant , fruit yield , fruit length , fruit diameter , pericarp thickness , TSS , shelf life, number of locule, number of leaflet, number of compound leaflet, leaf length , leaf diameter , plant height , branches/plant, fruit size, fruit shape, plant growth nature, cluster nature of fruit, type of fruit.Farming systems have been commonly defined by Dixon et al.  as “… a population of individual farm systems that have broadly similar resource bases, enterprise patterns, household livelihoods and constraints, and for which similar development strategies and interventions would be appropriate. Depending on the scale of the analysis, a farming system can encompass a few dozen or many millions of households”. A general approach to farming systems research and development is to select relatively uniform sets of conditions for conducting research. Various criteria can be used to classify farming systems based on the farms and these may vary in different geographical locations.

Some of the major characteristics by which farms can be categorised are suggested by Shaner ; these include permanent cultivation of rain-fed land or irrigated farming, agro-climatic zone, soils and terrain. It is however widely accepted amongst farming systems researchers that farms are classified according to the area, the needs of the study and the available information. In South Africa, agricultural farming systems are characterised by a duality in which there exist large-scale commercial farmers and small-scale farmers. Historically large-scale commercial farmers were identified as capital intensive and over time have been regarded as the main drivers of national food security. Large-scale commercial farms were characterised by the size of the landholdings which according to was on average about 1640 hectares in 2000 and continued to grow to 2113 hectares per farm in 2007. Despite this widely accepted view, argues that small-scale farming in South Africa is as viable, profitable and efficient as large-scale farming. This argument is supported by evidence from the food security report for South Africa. Various studies support the idea that emphasis needs to be placed on small-scale farmers in order to ensure long term food security at the national and household scales. The two main farming systems can be found within the Vhembe district of the Limpopo Province and are impacted by the same core drivers of production i.e., land, labour, capital and enterprise, however, they respond to these drivers differently. According to staple crops have commonly been the most important for cultivation by small-scale farmers in developing countries because they providecarbohydrates and calories that meet essential energy requirements. High-value crops  also known as horticultural crops or non-traditional crops are grown for food, nutrition, human health and wellbeing and include fruits and vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops. These crops are known to return a significant price premium per hectare or per unit compared to traditional staple food crops because they do not often form part of the customary diet of the local population and are largely grown for their cash values in domestic and export markets. This characteristic makes the cultivation of HVCs an optimal choice to improve the financial position of small-scale farmers in developing countries. Small-scale farmers stand to gain higher incomes from farming if they diversify their activities and venture into the cultivation of HVCs as opposed to solely relying on staple crops which produce low earnings. HVCs can also improve the ability of small-scale farmers to meet their household food security needs through incomes obtained from participation in local and export markets to purchase food for household consumption. Farmers’ potential to access lucrative markets is hinged on their ability to successfully produce quality products.Large-scale commercial farmers who are predominantly white have mainly controlled these sectors in the region; however there has been a more recent drive by government towards the commercialisation of these commodities amongst small-scale farmers as a means of addressing rural poverty and unemployment. The local Department of Agriculture recorded 1113 commercially oriented small-scale farmers growing sub-tropical fruit and nuts in the Vhembe district in 2018 cultivating a total land area of 4713 hectares. These farmers are strongly supported by the private sector, specifically commodity associations, that aim to assist small-scale farmers to increase their yields and expand the land area under cultivation.