Integrated Farming with Inter-Cropping

  • October 31, 2021
  • Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
  • Category: DPN Topics
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Integrated Farming with Inter-Cropping

Subject – Agriculture

Context – Indian farming practices: Learning from elsewhere in the world

Concept –

  • Integrated farming with intercropping increases food production while reducing environmental footprint.
  • A work found that
    • (1) “relay planting” enhances yield,
    • (2) within-field rotation or “strip rotation”, allowing strips for planting other plants (such as grass, fruits) besides the major crop was more fruitful,
    • (3) “soil munching,” that is, available means such as crop straw, in addition to the major crop such as wheat or rice, and
    • (4) “no-till” or a reduced tillage, which increases the annual crop yield up by 15.6% to 49.9%, and decreasing the environmental footprint by 17.3%, compared with traditional monoculture cropping.
  • This led to the conclusion that small farm holders can grow more food and have reduced environmental footprint.
  • About 70% of its rural households still depend primarily on agriculture for their livelihood, with 82% of farmers being small and marginal.

Relay Planting –

  • Relay planting means the planting of different crops in the same plot, one right after another, in the same season.
  • Examples of such relay cropping would be planting rice (or wheat), cauliflower, onion, and summer gourd (or potato onion, lady’s fingers and maize), in the same season.

Advantages of relay planting –

  • less risk since you do not have to depend on one crop alone.
  • It also means better distribution of labour,
  • insects spread less, and
  • any legumes actually add nitrogen to the soil!

Difficulties involved with relay planting –

  • mechanisation here can be difficult,
  • management requirements are somewhat higher.

It is here that women come in handy.

  • Women plant materials for home food, such as greens, leafy vegetables and pulses such as green grams, Finger millet (ragi in Hindi, kezhwaragu in Tamil) horse gram (chaneki dal in Hindi, kudure gram in Kannada, and kollu in Tamil), cowpeas, and also grass (all of which add to the nitrogen to the soil and also to the world around us, fixing nitrogen not just under our feet but also in the air we breathe; the carbon dioxide, ozone, and the oxides of nitrogen and phosphorus that we inhale every day from the filthy atmosphere is at least nullified a little, thanks to relay cropping.

Strip Cropping –

  • Strip cropping has been used in the U.S. (where the fields are larger than those in India), where they grow wheat, along with corn and soyabean, in the same farm in an alternative manner. However, this needs large lands.
  • In India, where there are large fields (such as the ones owned by cities and state governments), the land is divided into strips, and strips of grass are left to grow between the crops. Planting of trees to create shelters has helped in stabilising the desert in Western India.
  • Western Karnataka (and the nearby Telangana and Northern Tamil Nadu), dry belts with frequent droughts, where 80% of the farmers depend on groundnut as their option.

Soil mulching and no-till –

  • Soil mulching requires keeping all bare soil covered with straw, leaves, and the like, even when the land is in use. Erosion is curtailed, moisture retained, and beneficial organisms, such as earthworms, kept in place.
  • The same set of benefits are also offered by not tilling the soil.

These four methods suggested by the international group are worth following in India.

Agriculture Integrated Farming with Inter-Cropping