Gaurav Mahajan

Ridge Planted Pigeonpea and Furrow Planted Rice in an Intercropping System as Affected by Nitrogen and Weed Management

Intercropping is a crop management system involving the growing of two or more dissimilar crops in distinct row combinations simultaneously on the same land area. In intercropping, the component crop species are usually sown in parallel lines enabling mechanical crop production, maintenance, and harvest. Intercropping involves crop intensification in respect to both time and space dimensions (Ahlawat and Sharma, 2002). Conceptually, an intercropping system helps for risk avoidance from epidemic of insect-pest and diseases and overcome adverse environmental conditions in agro-climatologically unstable regions along with increasing solar radiation utilization and inputs including fertilizer and water utilization compared to monoculture crops. Intercropping not only reduces the risk associated with input costs but also increases profit potential (Rathi and Verma, 1979). Moreover, it provides several major advantages namely, diversification reduces risk associated with crop failure, increased productivity per unit area and time, offers greater yield stability and utilizes the available growth resources more efficiently and sustainably. Furthering rationales of this practice, it caters to the multiple needs of the farmer, is a self-provisioning device, is a mechanism to spread labour peaks, and keeps weeds under check (Singh and Jha, 1984). A number of researchers (Enyi, 1973; Sengupta et al., 1985) reported greater land use efficiency utilizing intercropping and reductions of weed growth through competition. The yield advantage obtained through intercropping has been reported mainly due to efficient utilization and optimization of available natural growth