Crop Production and Husbandry
What you must understand
Crop production links the plant's growth cycle to the farmer's calendar. Know the stages - seed selection and treatment, nursery or direct sowing, germination, vegetative growth, flowering, fruiting and maturity - and what each stage demands in water, nutrients and light. Understand seed viability tests (float test, germination percentage), spacing and plant density, thinning, pricking out, transplanting shock, mulching, staking, pruning, and crop rotation as a disease and fertility tool. Know the difference between monoculture and mixed cropping, and between a nursery crop and a field crop. Husbandry means the routine care operations: weeding, watering, fertilising, pest and disease scouting, and harvesting at the correct maturity index (colour, firmness, size, days after sowing).
Traps in questions
- Confusing germination percentage with purity: germination % counts only seedlings that emerge normally from a tested sample.
- Assuming more fertiliser is always better; excess nitrogen gives leafy, soft growth prone to lodging and pests.
- Mixing up thinning (removing excess plants to reduce competition) with pricking out (moving seedlings to a wider container).
- Forgetting that transplanting should be done in the cooler part of the day and seedlings watered in.
- Rotation questions: never follow a crop with another from the same family (tomato after potato).
Worked example
A farmer tests 200 seeds; 160 germinate normally. Germination percentage = (160 ÷ 200) × 100 = 80%. If the recommended field population is 40 000 plants/ha and each seed lot gives 80% field emergence, sow 40 000 ÷ 0.80 = 50 000 seeds per hectare. Rule of thumb: always sow more seed than target plants to cover germination and field losses.