Response of Sesame to Intercropping with Groundnut and Cowpea

Sustainable food production is one of the major challenges of the twenty-first century in the era of global environmental problems such as climate change, increasing population, and natural resource degradation. Therefore, intercropping approach to sustainable food production is the need of hour to overcome this global issue. Field experiments were conducted under rain-fed conditions for two consecutive rainy seasons (2015/2016-2016/2017) at North Kordofan Estate, Sudan, to investigate the effects of intercropping sesame with groundnut and cowpea on its growth, yield components, and Land Equivalent Ratio (LER). The experiment consisted of nine treatments: three sole crops of sesame (S), groundnut (G) and cowpea (C) and six spatial arrangements of 1S:1G or C, 1S:2G or C, and 2S:1G or C row/s of sesame with each groundnut and cowpea. The treatments were arranged in a Randomized Complete Block Design with four replications. The results showed that intercropping had a significant (P ) effect on most of the parameters measured in this study. For sesame, the treatment 2S:1G (two rows of sesame alternating with one row of groundnut) gave the best number of seeds per capsules (79 seeds). For groundnut, the intercropping 1S:1G had the highest number of pods per plant (11 pods) and seed yield (7 g/plant). The spatial arrangement 1S:1G was the best pattern in terms of land equivalent ratio with 1.6. From this study, for attaining the highest total crop yield per unit area of land, where there is no crop bias and the preference is to maximize land use, the practice of planting one row of sesame alternating with one row of groundnut is recommended.

Automated summary

This study demonstrates the significant impact of intercropping on the growth and yield of sesame and groundnut. Planting one row of sesame alternating with one row of groundnut resulted in the highest number of seeds per capsule for sesame and the highest yield for groundnut.