Intercropping Legumes Covers with Maize on Soil Moisture Improvement in Selected Dry Land Areas of Basketo Special Woreda’s, Ethiopia

Abstract

Intercropping provides sufficient scope to include two or more crops simultaneously on the same piece of land, targeting higher land productivity. There is limited experimental evidence on the benefits of intercropping systems, which remains largely unstudied. This study was conducted to evaluate the effect of intercropping on soil moisture conservation in a moisture-stressed area. For this study, a randomized complete block design was used to establish experimental plots with three replications. Five treatments were evaluated, including maize only, lablab only, cowpea only, lablab with maize, and cowpea with maize. Disturbed soil samples were collected from a depth of 0–30 cm and composited for soil moisture and physicochemical property analysis. The yield and biomass of maize and legume shrubs were collected from each plot, and the variations were analyzed using the general linear model. The land equivalent ratio (LER) was computed to evaluate land productivity. The result showed that higher soil moisture content was recorded on maize-cowpea intercrop (34.33%), followed by maize-lablab intercrop (31.20%) relative to sole maize (26.83%) at the development stage in the first-year trial. This implies the benefit of legume shrubs on soil moisture conservation, both under mono-cropped and intercropped conditions. In this trial, the highest LER values were obtained for maize intercropped with Lablab 1.44 at Angila 4 kebele, while at Angila 3 kebele, the highest LER values were obtained for maize intercropped with cowpea 1.29. Therefore, conducting similar studies for more than two years on permanent field plots is vital to achieving considerable changes in soil moisture and soil physicochemical properties, as well as helping farmers make better use of cereal-legume intercropping systems to increase yields in moisture-stress areas.

Keywords: Intercropping; Legume; Land equivalent ratio; Soil moisture; Yield