Conservation Agriculture in rice-mustard cropping system for five years: Impacts on crop productivity, profitability, water-use efficiency, and soil properties
Introduction
Resource conservation has assumed greater significance in the post-green revolution era in India in view of widespread degradation of resource bases, and the need of reducing the continuously-increasing production cost. Cereals, namely, wheat (Triticum aestivum (L.) emend Fiori & Paol) and rice (Oryza sativa L.) with higher growth rates (∼3.0 % and ∼2.3 %, respectively) could meet the food requirement of increasing population of India (Fischer et al., 2002), but there has occurred considerable over-exploitation of natural resources, soil health degradation, and global warming in the intensively-cultivated cropping systems (Jat et al., 2013). In India, the rice - wheat system occupies 10.5 million ha area (Ladha et al., 2009; Saharawat et al., 2010) and has become the most dominant practice in the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP). However, due to continuous practice/adoption of the rice-wheat system, several problems such as nutrients imbalance/ deficiency and low nutrient-use efficiency, scarcity in irrigation water and water table depletion, energy and labour crisis, high emissions of greenhouse gases, and weed shift and resistance (Gupta and Seth, 2007; Nath et al., 2017a) have cropped up recently, threatening the sustainability of this system.
Conservation Agriculture (CA) is considered to be a viable option for sustainable intensification of crops in cropping systems and profitable production (Kassam et al., 2009; Ladha et al., 2009; Das et al., 2014) and is being studied in India. Fundamentally, to derive maximum benefit from CA, location-specific appropriate crop rotations and system-based CA practices need to be developed (Das et al., 2018; Kassam et al., 2018). This requires enough on-stations and on-farms researches to be carried out to develop location-specific appropriate CA practice (Bhattacharyya et al., 2013, 2015). As an alternative to the conventional tillage practice, some of the CA-based component options such as zero tillage (ZT), crop residue retention, and crop diversification have been evaluated in the IGP (Das et al. (2013), 2018; Saad et al., 2016; Hazra et al., 2018). Improvement in soil organic carbon (SOC) is a major goal of adopting CA practices. In fact, amount and quality of added crop residues significantly influence SOC sequestration and stabilization under CA (Weil et al., 2003; Gal et al., 2007). Higher residue addition in a cropping system in a year and/or reduced tillage intensity maintains or even increases SOC level with time (Peterson et al., 1998). Rapid ground water depletion in conventional rice-wheat system (Humphreys et al., 2010) in the IGP of India is another important consideration that spearheads promoting CA involving crop diversification towards less water use with increased efficiency. Besides, brown manuring (BM) is believed to be a climate-resilient practice (Oyeogbe et al., 2017), which offers several benefits such as weed suppression, moisture conservation, sequestration of carbon and nitrogen, and improvement of soil health. It can also minimize herbicides intake into environment through higher weed control efficiency and less herbicide use (Maity and Mukherjee, 2011). Brown manuring involves growing of Sesbania bispinosa (Jacq.) W. Wight simultaneously with rice for initial 25–30 days and then killing of Sesbania plants by using 2,4-D @ 0.5 kg a.i. ha−1 or bispyribac-Na @ 20 g a.i. ha−1. Brown manuring is an economic alternative in CA to green manuring practice under conventional agriculture (Hobbs and Gupta, 2003), but studies are scanty to substantiate these benefits.
Mustard (Brassica juncea L.) is grown during dry winter season and has deep tap root system, which reduces its irrigation water requirement. It requires lower irrigation water (∼150−200 mm) than wheat (400−500 mm), thus, can lead to save water and enhance water-use efficiency. Mustard is endowed with an assured minimum support price (MSP), which gets revised every year by the Government of India (GOI, 2018-19). In 2018-19, the MSP of mustard has substantially increased to INR 42,000 t−1, which is almost 2.3 times higher the MSP of wheat ∼INR 18,400 t−1). Mustard can be an economically alternative crop to wheat in both irrigated and rainfed agro-ecologies. Recently, the Government of India (GOI) has taken a policy decision to promote mustard in rice fallow areas, widely distributed in the rainfed agro-ecosystems of eastern, central and peninsular India and North-eastern Hill Region. India accounts for 79 % (∼11.65 million ha) of the total rice fallows of South-Asia (∼15.0 million ha) (NAAS, 2013). In fact, CA with ZT and residue retention suits better for growing mustard after rice in rainfed conditions (Singh et al., 2018).
After the harvest of winter crops in March-April, the land remains vacant till the middle of June and a short duration (∼60 days) legume crop such as summer mungbean (SMB) [Vigna radiata (L.) Wilczek] can be grown during that period (Hazra et al., 2014). There is enough opportunity to adopt CA in the IGP with diversified crop rotations like rice-mustard-mungbean system. Therefore, we adopted summer mungbean in two treatments to explore the feasibility of a rice-mustard-mungbean system with CA practice. However, information is scant on the effects of CA on productivity, profitability, resource-use efficiency in rice-mustard rotation, which are important indices for sustainability of that system. We presumed that CA-based practice comprising ZT, crop residue retention, brown manuring, intervention /intensification with legume (i.e., summer mungbean) would lead to increase crop productivity, profitability, water-use efficiency, and carbon concentration in rice-mustard rotation compared with conventional transplanted puddled rice - conventional till mustard (TPR-CTM) system. The objectives were: (i) to assess the medium-term (∼5 years) impacts of CA on crops and system productivities, sustainability, and economics; and (ii) to determine water-use efficiency and soil carbon pools under rice-mustard system in the North-western IGP of India.
Section snippets
Experimental site
The experiments were carried out at the ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi (28°35′ N, 77°12′ E, altitude 228 m above mean sea level). Sub-tropical and semi-arid climate, having hot/dry summers and cold winters had prevailed in the experimental site. During the period of the study (2013-14 to 2017-18), May and June were the hottest months with 40−46 °C mean daily maximum temperature, while January was the coolest month, having 6−8 °C mean daily minimum temperature. Of the
Rice productivity
The pooled analysis of variance showed the significant effects of year, CA practice and their interaction on grain yields of rice and mustard as well as system productivity (Table 2). Therefore, the year-wise data of these parameters were presented. Rice yield increased up to 3rd year and declined thereafter in 4th and 5th years in almost all CA-based DSR systems (Table 3), while the yield of TPR was more consistent over the years. Highest rice yields were was recorded in the TPR-ZTM and
Productivity, economics, and sustainability
Conservation Agriculture (CA) with ZT, residue retention, and integration of legume has been recommended to increase input-use efficiency and profitability in rice-wheat system of the North-western IGP of India (Ladha et al., 2003). Rice-mustard rotation with CA adoption can replace the rice-wheat system in some parts of Indian IGP and would suit better in the rice - fallow areas for a possible double cropping system. Our hypothesis that the CA-based rice-mustard rotation might potentially
Conclusion
Results showed that the CA-based rice-mustard-summer mungbean [ZTDSR- ZTM- ZTSMB (+R)] and rice-mustard [ZTDSR + BM-ZTM (+R)] produced lower rice yield but higher mustard yield than the CT-based rice-mustard system (TPR—CTM) and partial CA based TPR-ZTM. However, the rice-mustard system [ZTDSR + BM-ZTM (+R)] having lower system productivity (∼0.3 t ha−1 but slightly higher net returns ∼INR 4300 ha−1) than the conventional TPR-CTM system, was not conclusive. The CA-based ZTDSR- ZTM- ZTSMB (+R)
Declaration Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute for providing necessary facilities to conduct the research.
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