Section 3 (Crop Management)

Gupta et al.
were promoted in eastern and western Indian IGP in an Asian Development Bank funded project on
sustaining rice-wheat rotation. Successful farmer participatory experiments in eastern IGP, in the state of
Bihar, India, revealed number of profitable rice based cropping systems where maize could be grown in
winter. Some of these rotations are given in Table 2 (Kumar, 2003). Among these rotations, rice-potatoonion-maize
(green cobs) was found to be most profitable in south Bihar because of additional higher
income from the green cobs. Similarly, rice-winter maize-potato gave highest net returns (USD 1011 ha -1 )
in North Bihar. In comparisons involving traditional sole crop and intercropping of maize and potato on
raised beds (RWC, 2003), intercrops performed better than the sole crops mainly due to the reason they
were sown on flat fields in improper crop geometry, a common problem in these areas. Pandey et al.
(2001) obtained highest net returns of USD 1473 per hectare by growing maize (for green cobs)-radishonion
crop rotation under irrigated conditions. The next best system was found to be maize (for green
cobs)-rice-cabbage with a net profit of USD 719 per hectare.
Maize is a most versatile crop for growing intercrops, because of the wide row spacing it needs,
providing higher income to the farmers. It was found that soybean and groundnut make good intercrops
with maize (Prakash et al., 1993). Growing of maize + groundnut in 2:2 row proportion by paired row
planting gave highest combined intercrop yield when compared to any other intercropping tested. In an
experiment conducted at Narendra Deva University of Agriculture and Technology, Faizabad, Uttar
Pradesh, the potato + maize intercropping in 2:1 ratio gave higher net returns than when sown in 1:1
proportion. Though the potato-maize sequence gave the highest net returns in this experiment, farmers
could be benefited by intercropping which gives similar returns in the single season as an added
advantage (Singh et al., 1998). The authors showed that the higher yields could be obtained when the
maize was sown at earthing-up of potato which will reduce the competition for light and nutrients at the
initial stages of potato.
Farmers and researchers quantified the bed planting benefits in terms of savings of resources like
irrigation water. In Bangladesh, bed planted maize out yielded the conventional crop by 1.03 tha -1 and
saved 18% of water (Table 3 and 4, Khan, 2003). Not only this, replacing one hectare of rice, whose
water requirement is 4,240 mm (Sharma et al., 2002) with maize, whose water requirement is 550-650
mm (Violic, 2000), allows the saved water to be used to raise six hectares of maize or slightly more
hectares of pulses. Bed planting further improves this efficiency, which only means this water can be used
in increasing the cropping intensities, area and ultimately the food production. One might argue that many
other coarse grain cereals use much less water than maize and they can also be grown if the objective is to
save water. But maize is the only crop which has many uses and hence offers much better income security
to farmers than the other coarse grain cereals.
The quality protein maize, popularly called with its acronym QPM, enriches the nutritional quality of
maize based food and feed preparations due to its high available lysine and tryptophan content and
biological value, which is more than double that of normal maize (CIMMYT, 2001). The QPM cultivars
Shaktiman 1 (three-way hybrid) and Shaktiman 2 (single cross hybrid) were grown in farmers fields with
success and are having good demand due to high quality protein. Bed planting of QPM maize + pulse
crops will provide complete nutritional security to farming communities and dependent farm animals.
Rice fallows occupy nearly 4 mha in Indian-IGP alone and are potential areas for increasing the
cropping intensity. The available conventional crop establishment techniques can seldom allow these
areas to be cropped due to their high moisture content hindering the mechanical manipulation of soil.
Improved subsurface drainage system seems to be a possibility to bring these lands into cultivation. A
successful establishment of kharif rice on raised beds in these areas will open them to cropping in
subsequent seasons. Growing winter maize on raised beds in subsequent season with appropriate intercrop
will be a good proposition.
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