Small Millets with Legumes Intercropping for Climate Smart Agriculture

A specific combination of early leaf area development, maximum solar energy fascination, conditions favouring efficient translocation of dry matter to the seed, root nodules fixing more nitrogen in the soil, and finally crop canopy efficiency will be more during the growing season, as demonstrated by finger millet with black gram at different plant densities and row spacing.Millet-pulse intercropping system provides double economy with such minimal inputs crops where the former requires less input and the later will increase soil fertility and health by biological nitrogen fixation.Consequently, the purpose of this study was to examine the production performance and energy transfer of leguminous crops and small millets.In the Rabi' seasons of 2021 to 2023 at the Agricultural College and Research Institute, Vazhavachanur, Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu field experiments were conducted to investigate the intercropping of finger millet with blackgram and redgram with varied ratios under irrigated condition with seven treatments and three replications.It is inferred that the finger millet treatment with a 4:1 blackgram ratio performed significantly more photosynthetic efficiency or crop growth rate during the crop growth period.This system can be tried with other minor millets and other pulse crops for attaining better livelihood by small and marginal farmers under rain-fed cropping.