Abstract
Frequent droughts have threatened the crop yields and livelihoods of many smallholder farmers in South Africa. Pigeonpea can be grown by farmers to mitigate the impacts of droughts caused by climate change. An experiment was conducted at Fountainhill Farm from January 2016 to December 2017. The trial examined grain yield in addition to water use efficiency (WUE) of pigeonpea intercropped with maize versus sole pigeonpea and maize. A randomized complete block design, replicated three times, was used. Soil water tension was measured at 20, 50, and 120 cm within plots. The highest and lowest soil water tension was recorded at 20 m and 120 m respectively. Combined biomass and grain yield were significantly different: pigeonpea + maize (5513 kg ha−1) > pigeonpea (3368 kg ha−1) > maize (2425 kg ha−1). A similar trend was observed for WUE and land equivalent ratio (LER), where pigeonpea + maize outperformed all sole cropping systems. The inclusion of pigeonpea in a traditional mono-cropping system is recommended for smallholder farmers due to greater WUE, LER and other associated benefits such as food, feed and soil fertility amelioration, and it can reduce the effects of droughts induced by climate change.
Highlights
Climate change and variability have threatened crop production, which has left many smallholder farmers facing food insecurity, as well as having a devastating effect on people’s livelihood [1,2]
The inclusion of pigeonpea in a traditional mono-cropping system is recommended for smallholder farmers due to greater water use efficiency (WUE), land equivalent ratio (LER) and other associated benefits such as food, feed and soil fertility amelioration, and it can reduce the effects of droughts induced by climate change
This study revealed complementarity in water uptake from the upper layer of the soil, more studies are needed to analyze complementarity in water abstraction from deeper soil layers, especially in the second season where the treatments that contained pigeonpea showed an increase in soil water tension at the deepest layer (120 cm); this might have resulted in higher productivity in an intercropping system than sole maize
Summary
Climate change and variability have threatened crop production, which has left many smallholder farmers facing food insecurity, as well as having a devastating effect on people’s livelihood [1,2]. Most smallholder farmers in RSA till on marginal areas distinguished by low and unpredictable rainfall, and sandy soils with little organic matter, in addition to low nutrient content [4] Farming practices in such environments are risky and unreliable, which leads to low income and poverty in the rural households relying on agriculture for their livelihood. The emergence of such risks calls for critical, formidable action to ensure the resilience of the RSA sector via adoption of drought tolerant or resilient crops such as pigeonpea [5].
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