Intercropping red chili with leguminous crops to improve crop diversity and farmers’ resilience to climate change effects in dryland

Abstract

This study aimed to explore the potential benefits of intercropping and determine the best time to sow leguminous crops between the rows of red chili or chili crops. Two leguminous crops, mungbean, and peanut were intercropped with chili in a dryland area of Gumantar, North Lombok, Indonesia. The leguminous seeds were sown five times; at the same time, a week, two weeks, three weeks, and four weeks after transplanting the chili seedlings. The treatments were arranged in a randomized block design with three replications. The size of each treatment plot was 600 × 100 cm, and the chili crops’ spacing was 60 × 60 cm. Three rows of leguminous crops were sown between the rows of chili crops with a spacing of 20 × 20 cm. Monocropping of chili, mungbean, and peanut was also provided in each block to calculate the land equivalent ratio (LER). The results showed that all the intercropping treatments had a LER value of higher than 1.0, indicating the advantage of intercropping over monocropping in terms of land utilization.