Book of Extended summaries ISDA

International Conference on Reimagining Rainfed Agro-ecosystems: Challenges &
Opportunities during 22-24, December 2022 at ICAR-CRIDA, Hyderabad
T5-01O-1063
Intercropping as ‘Ecological Precision Agriculture’ to Address Field
Heterogeneity
Iman Raj Chongtham*
Department of Biosystems and Technology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences,
Lomma 234 22, Sweden.
*raj.chongtham@slu.se
During the last century, agricultural intensification with high use of external inputs such as
pesticides, mineral fertilizers and crops grown as mono/sole crops has increased food
production. However, such simplified and resource intensive agricultural practices are
associated with causing environmental problems, notably biodiversity loss, development of
resistance to pesticides, climate change, and eutrophication (Gliessman, 2014). Dependence on
one crop and external inputs can increase vulnerability of cropping system to natural disasters
such as drought, the current COVID-19 pandemic (e.g. disruptions in supply chains) and high
input prices due to conflicts (e.g. in Ukraine). Furthermore, crop production in organic systems
is quite challenging as they have high spatial and temporal yield variability. Organic farmers
have limited ‘quick and easy’ solutions such as chemical pesticides and fertilizers to deal with
problems compared to conventional farmers (Chongtham et al., 2016). Intercropping (IC) can
potentially address several of these challenges.
Jensen et al. (2015) considered intercropping of non-legume crops (such as cereals) with grain
legumes as an ‘ecological precision agriculture’ concept since the intercrop in a specific site
will adjust its botanical composition, performances and acquisition of N from soil and fixation
from atmosphere according to available soil mineral N by competitive interactions. This
concept can be related to ‘stress gradient hypothesis’ in Ecology (Bertness and Callaway,
1994), which assumes that the outcome of plant-plant interactions is dictated by environmental
conditions, i.e. in harsh environment (e.g., from temperature or grazing) there will be more
positive plant-plant interactions. However, there is lack of knowledge on the degree to which
field-scale soil variability affects the competitive interactions between the IC components and
use of available resources.
This study aims to understand if intercropping can adapt to field heterogeneity more efficiently
than their respective sole crops (SC) by suppressing weeds and producing higher and more
stable yields.
Methodology
On alarge field with heterogeneous soil conditions, we measured soil ECa using EM-38 device.
Based on this data, strips of crops: SC oat, SC pea and IC oat-pea (50%:50% seeding
697 | Page Emerging approaches (RS, AI, ML, Drones etc) for crop management &assessment