Diversification of Existing Rice-Wheat Cropping System for Increasing Productivity and Profitability under Irrigated Upland Conditions of Bihar

An experiment was conducted at College of Horticulture, Noorsarai during 2012-2015 to diversify and intensify the rice-wheat cropping system by including vegetables as cash crops for developing need based intensive and profitable cropping system for small farmers of irrigated upland conditions of Bihar. Among the tested diversified crop sequences, Onion-Onion-Bottle gourd recorded significantly higher rice equivalent yield (369 q/ha) and highest production efficiency (101.1kg/ha/day) over all the crop sequences, which was 229% higher over existing rice-wheat cropping (112.2q/ha) system followed by Okra-Cabbage-Bottle gourd and Okra-Potato-Okra with rice equivalent yield (305.3 and 304.7) q/ha respectively. Result indicated that diversification of existing rice-wheat cropping offers better system productivity and profitability. Hence, Onion-Onion-Bottle gourd can be adopted as most profitable cropping system because it can potentially increase farm incomes, especially in a country like India where demand of high-value vegetable crops increasing more rapidly than that of staple food crops. As it is bitter truth that, Indian agriculture is overwhelmingly dominated by smallholders and therefore, they need to diversify their systems towards high value crops.