Cropping Systems of Pigeon Pea

Practice of mixed cropping of pigeon pea with companion crop like sorghum, maize, ragi, Kakun, black gram, moong, Cowpea and groundnut is very common. Being deep rooted, the crop is very well suited for mixed cropping for mixed cropping and enter cropping with the shallow rooted ones. Mixed cropping besides offering an insurance against failure of the crop due to disease pest, and frost, enables the farmer to obtain verity of crops of their needs from the same piece of land.

The crop generally grown with wide row spacings. However, the genital growth is quite slow and the grand growth starts after 60-70 days of the sowing. A lot of inter-row spaces, therefore, remain vacant during the early stage and get infested by weeds. The space between row could be profitably utilized by growing short duration crops such as blackgram, moong and cowpea etc. Intercropping with black gram (Pant V-30), Moong, Pnat Moong-1 and cow pea (Pusa do phasli) gives about 4-7 quintals per hectare additional yield without affecting yield of arhar.

Short duration arhar fits well in following cropping system:

Pigeon pea-wheat

Pigeon pea -late potato

Pigeon pea-lentil

Pigeon pea-sugarcane

Pigeon pea- wheat moong