PKM-2 is Tamil Nadu Agricultural University’s follow-on moringa release, developed at the Horticultural College and Research Institute in Periyakulam, the same breeding program that produced PKM-1. Where PKM-1 became the reference cultivar most published moringa agronomy is built on, PKM-2 was bred for pod economics: growers selling into the fresh-pod vegetable market as well as leaf and oil channels.
Yield
PKM-2 posts the highest documented productivity of the TNAU releases. TNAU’s Agritech Portal reports 138 tonnes of fresh pods per hectare under high-density planting at 1.2 by 1.2 metre spacing, with main shoots pinched at 80 days after sowing. That figure is a ceiling from a spacing trial, not a farm average. TNAU’s own production handbook describes PKM-2 as a hybrid of two local selections and puts its working yield at about 98 tonnes per hectare against roughly 52 for PKM-1, a 48 percent gain over its predecessor.
What buyers should know
Like PKM-1, PKM-2 is an annual, seed-propagated line, grown in short cycles and replanted rather than kept as a long-lived perennial. Cultivar identity is a trait-level variable: pod size and seed oil yield are cultivar-linked, so a lot grown from PKM-2 stock behaves differently at the press and in the pod market than a PKM-1 lot. The one published head-to-head comparison grown under matched conditions, Farooq et al. in Plants (Basel), 2021, ranked PKM-1 slightly ahead of PKM-2 on protein, mineral and antioxidant readings, with both well ahead of an unimproved conventional check.
A sourcing note: the pod dimension and seed oil content figures that circulate for PKM-2 trace to commercial seed-vendor listings rather than published trials, and The Moringa Report does not quote them. Ask a supplier for trial data, not a catalogue line.
For the full story of how the Periyakulam cultivars shaped the trade, see PKM-1, PKM-2, ODC-3: The Cultivar Nobody Puts on the Invoice and Tamil Nadu’s Moringa Belt.