Competition indices used to evaluate the agronomic and monetary advantage in intercropping: A review

Abstract

With the depletion of land available for agricultural crop cultivation, farmers must take steps to enhance the crop production in order to provide food to the population, improve their livelihood, and generate income. Although there are many methods of cultivation such as greenhouse cultivation and ponic systems to alleviate the problem of land scarcity, those methods may be very expensive. But intercropping can be identified as a method of cultivation to increase the productivity of the land with lower costs, where it involves cultivation of two or more crops together with each other. All the intercropping combinations would not be successful depending on the competition for light, space, time, nutrients and water as well as on the interaction between each. In this context, scientists have identified indices to evaluate the degree of compatibility of each crop combinations. These indices will determine whether any particular crops can be grown in combined to increase the productivity. Authors reviewed the published information and summarized the results. The objective of compiling this review was to gather information of various intercropping researches on intercropping indices and to show the degree of success or unsuccess of each and every crop combination. This paper provides a great idea on the resource use efficiency and advantage of intercropping while giving comparative ideas on selecting crop combinations for intercropping systems. For the compilation, many research articles on various crop combinations were studied and the most important and valuable data were gathered in this paper. This paper would be very much useful for researchers who are going to experiments with the studies related to intercropping.