Role of Conservation Agriculture for Sustainable Horticultural Crop Production through Intercropping in North-West India
2013
Naresh, R.K. | Singh, B. | Kumar, Arvind | Prakash, Satya
Conservation agriculture seeks to at least use nature as the model for designing agricultural systems. Since nature integrates her plants and animals into diverse landscape,a major tenet of conservation agriculture is efficiency and lack of waste products in nature. When domestication of crops replaced hunting and gathering of food, landscape changed accordingly. By producing a limited selection of crop plants and animals, human kind has substantially reduced the level of biological diversity over much of the earth. There is more cooperation in nature than competition. Cooperation is exemplified by mutually beneficial relationships that occur between species within communities. If left undistributed and unplanted an abandoned crop field will first be colonized by just a few species of organisms but after several years a complex community made up of many wild species develops. Stability is reached by a community when it has reached a high level of diversity. Diverse communities have fewer fluctuations in numbers of a given species and are stable. The practices which promote diversity and stability on the farm are enterprise diversification, crop rotation, provision of more habitats for micro organisms, intercropping and integration of crop farming with livestock production. Intercropping is the cultivation of two or more crops at the same time in the same field.Its advantages are risk minimization, increased income and food security and reduction of soil erosionl. This paper discusses the practice of intercropping in horticultural crop production to promote sustainability.
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