Intercropping

Intercropping

Subject – Agriculture

Context – Solution to stagnant prices, rising costs: Intercropping

Concept –

• Intercropping is the practice of growing two or more crops in proximity.
• The most common goal of intercropping is to produce a greater yield on a given piece of land by making use of resources that would otherwise not be utilized by a single crop.
• Examples of intercropping strategies are planting a deep-rooted crop with a shallow-rooted crop, or planting a tall crop with a shorter crop that requires partial shade.
• Numerous types of intercropping, all of which vary the temporal and spatial mixture to some degree, have been identified: mixed intercropping, row cropping, relay cropping, etc.
• Mixed intercropping, as the name implies, is the most basic form in which the component crops are totally mixed in the available space.
• Row cropping involves the component crops arranged in alternate rows. Variations include alley cropping, where crops are grown in between rows of trees, and strip cropping, where multiple rows, or a strip, of one crop are alternated with multiple rows of another crop. A new version of this is to intercrop rows of solar photovoltaic modules with agriculture crops. This practice is called agrivoltaics.
• Temporal intercropping uses the practice of sowing a fast-growing crop with a slow-growing crop, so that the fast-growing crop is harvested before the slow-growing crop starts to mature.
• Further temporal separation is found in relay cropping, where the second crop is sown during the growth, often near the onset of reproductive development or fruiting, of the first crop, so that the first crop is harvested to make room for the full development of the second.
• Crop rotation is related, but is not intercropping, as the different types of crops are grown in a sequence of growing seasons rather than in a single season.

To know about Integrated Farming with Inter-Cropping, please refer October 2021 DPN.