Effect of Land Configuration on Different Crop Based Chickpea Sequences in Dryland Area of Central India

The present investigation makes an attempt to study the effect of land configuration on yield, water use efficiency and economics for cropping sequences in dryland area of Central India. Different cropping sequences soybean-chickpea, maize-chickpea and greengram-chickpea were adopted under different sets of land configurations such as Furrow Irrigated Raised Bed (FIRB), Broad Bed Furrow (BBF) and Flat System as Farmer’s Practices (FP). Various yield attributes such as plant height, dry matter per plant, branches/plant, pods/cob per plant, seeds/cob per plant, 100 seed weight, seed and stover yield along with Seed Equivalent Yield (SEY), gross and net return, Benefit Cost ratio, Rain Water Use Efficiency (RWUE) were evaluated in this study. In case of SEY, for soybean-chickpea, maximum SEY was observed in FIRB (3197 kg ha-1), followed by BBF (3131 kg ha-1) and FP (2870 kg ha-1). Similarly for maize-chickpea, highest SEY was detected in FIRB (3601 kg ha-1), followed by BBF (3485 kg ha-1) and FP (3241 kg ha-1). A similar trend was obtained for greengram-chickpea where FIRB expressed highest value of SEY (2121 kg ha-1) followed by BBF (2065 kg ha-1) and FP (1805 kg ha-1). The analysis of yield attributes along with economics clearly suggested that for all combinations of crop sequences, FIRB yielded better results over BBF and FP. The results obtained through this study clearly advocates the fact that sowing of rabi crops on such land configurations (FIRB and BBF) amplifies the crop yield due to the presence of residual moisture which ultimately leads to enhanced farm income.