Farmers resort to cultivation of a number of crops and rotate particular crop combinations. More than 250 cropping systems are being followed in India, of which 30 cropping systems are more prevalent.
Some of the important cropping systems are:
1. Sequential cropping system: Growing crops in sequence within a crop year, one crop being sown after the harvest of the other. For example, rice followed by pigeonpea, pigeonpea followed by wheat.
2. Intercropping System: Growing more than one crop in the same area in rows of definite proportion and pattern.
Alley cropping
Is an agroforestry practice in which perennial, preferably leguminous, trees or shrubs are grown simultaneously with an arable crop. The trees, managed as hedgerows, are grown in wide rows and the crop is planted in the interspace or ‘alley’ between the tree rows. During the cropping phase, the trees are pruned. Prunings are used as green manure or mulch on the crop to improve the organic matter status of the soil and to provide nutrients, particularly nitrogen, to the crop.
a.Season based cropping system
i. Kharif rice based cropping system
ii. Kharif maize based cropping system
iii. Kharif sorghum based cropping system
iv. Kharif millet based cropping system
v. Kharif groundnut based cropping system
vi. Winter wheat and chickpea based crop ping system
vii. Rabi sorghum based cropping system
b.Mixed cropping
In order to minimise the risk and uncertainty of mono cropping and to have sustainable yield and income, farmers are advised to go for mixed cropping.
