19 Feb Enhancing farmers profitability through wheat-cucurbits relay intercropping
गेहूं - कद्दू वर्गीय फसलों की रिले अंंत:फसल के माध्यम से किसानों का लाभ बढ़ाना Rice-wheat is one of the major cropping sequences being practiced on about 10.2 m ha area in India. The wide adoption of this system is mainly due to low risk of crop failure, good marketing facilities and better minimum support price. This system is very important for the national food security. To adequately address the nutritional security of the people, it is pertinent to increase the production of different vegetables and fruits. Owing to explosive increase in population and faster urbanization, it is very difficult to bring more area under vegetable and fruit cultivation. Also, the decreasing per capita land availability and increasing input costs have decreased the income and profit margins of the farmers. One of the ways to increase the farmer’s income is by increasing the cropping intensities following different cropping patterns. In past, the options tried for intensifying the rice-wheat cropping system were rice-rice-wheat, rice-wheat-greengram, rice-wheat-cowpea, rice-wheat-sorghum, rice-vegetable-wheat etc. Now, the governments of Haryana and Punjab have banned the cultivation of the summer rice due to fast depletion of the underground water. Also, some times, owing to early onset of monsoon as well as problem of manual picking and threshing of pods are posing hindrances to...