Intensification of rice-wheat cropping system with summer green gram improves growth, productivity and profitability of rice in the middle Indo-Gangetic Plains of India
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Elsevier BV
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Rice-wheat cropping system (RWCS) is the backbone of food security in Southeast Asia, particularly in India. However, continuous intensive cultivation has led to sustainability concerns including yield stagnation, poor resource use efficiency, soil organic carbon (SOC) depletion, multi-nutrient deficiencies, pest resurgence, and declining profit margins. Intensification of leguminous crop in the existing RWCS could be a possible solution. Thus a research trial with fifteen different rice-wheat cropping sequences was carried out at Bihar Agricultural University, Sabour, Bihar, India to investigate the impact of crop intensification on rice performances. The effect of green gram inclusion in the RWCS was more pronounced during the second year of experimentation. In this study, there was two conservation agriculture systems i.e. partial and full based on tillage intensity and crop establishment methods. The partial conservation agriculture system i.e. Vattar direct seeded rice (DSR) in which seeds are directly sown in a moist (vattar) soil condition after pre-sowing irrigation and light tillage, followed by zero tillage (ZT) wheat and ZT green gram recorded significantly higher yield attributes which led to enhancement in rice grain and straw yield by 36.8 % and 31.3 % respectively over the existing conventional RWCS in the year 2022. In addition to above, full conservation system of agriculture i.e. ZT DSR where dry seeds are directly drilled into unpuddled soil without any tillage followed by ZT wheat and ZT green gram, representing complete elimination of tillage operations throughout the cropping sequence also showed significantly superior to existing RWCS and observed highest net return (INR 82863 ha−1), B:C ratio (2.46), net energy (145351 MJ ha−1), energy use efficiency (14.5 %) and energy productivity (0.45 kg MJ−1) but statistically parallel result with partial conservation system after first year of experimentation. This study demonstrates that the full conservation agriculture-based system (ZT DSR-ZT wheat-ZT green gram) were found the most suitable climate resilient cropping system to intensify RWCS in the middle Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP) for overall better performance of rice.
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cropping systems, conservation agriculture, yields, zero tillage, soil organic carbon, farm management, profitability