Productivity Improvement in Coastal Region of Bangladesh through Improving Rice-based Cropping Patterns and Optimizing Nutrient Management

The productivity of rice-based cropping systems in the coastal zones of eastern India and Bangladesh is low, and we hypothesized that optimizing nutrient management could increase the system productivity as well as farm income. Therefore, we conducted an on-farm study in Barguna district, the coastal zone of Bangladesh, from 2019 to 2021 to optimize nutrient management for two intensified rice-based new cropping patterns (CP1: T. aus rice-T. aman rice-sunflower and CP2: T. au srice-T. aman rice-sweet gourd) for increasing crop productivity. The study considered five nutrient management packages namely, soil test-based (STB) fertilizer dose, STB fertilizer dose plus 25% NK, fertilizer dose as per the Fertilizer Recommendation Guide-2018, soil testing kit-based fertilizer dose, and farmer’s applied fertilizer dose for both the cropping patterns. Higher profitability was obtained from the T. aus rice-T. aman rice-sweet gourd pattern than the T. aus rice-T. aman rice-sunflower pattern. The highest system productivity was achieved by the application of STB fertilizer dose plus 25% NK which increased the system productivity of CP1 by 21% and 31% compared to the STB fertilizer dose and farmers’ applied dose, respectively. The productivity of CP2 with STB fertilizer dose plus 25% NK was increased by 31% over both the STB fertilizer and farmers’ applied doses. The findings of the study indicate that intensified cropping patterns such as T. aus rice-T. aman rice-sweet gourd with optimized nutrient supply (i.e. STB fertilizer dose plus 25% NK) can be highly profitable for the coastal farmers.