Crop Production: Cereals, Pulses, Oilseeds and Commercial Crops
What this domain covers
This domain tests the classification of field crops, the package of practices for major crops, Assam's rice seasons, jute and oilseed cultivation, and cropping systems.
Core rules and concepts
- Cereals: rice, wheat, maize. Pulses: blackgram, greengram, arhar, lentil, pea, gram. Oilseeds: mustard-rapeseed, sesame, groundnut, linseed. Commercial crops: jute, sugarcane, tea, cotton.
- Assam rice: ahu sown around March-April and harvested June-July; sali transplanted June-July and harvested November-December; boro transplanted November-December and harvested April-May.
- Package of practices: land preparation, good seed, seed treatment, nursery, timely transplanting, recommended spacing, balanced fertilizer, water management, weeding, IPM and timely harvest.
- Jute (Corchorus capsularis and C. olitorius) is a stem-fibre crop; fibre is extracted by retting in clean water after harvesting at the small-pod stage.
- Pulses fix nitrogen through Rhizobium and need only a small starter dose of nitrogen.
- Cropping systems: rice-rice, rice-mustard, rice-potato, rice-pulse.
Worked example
A plot is transplanted at 20 cm x 10 cm spacing. Area per hill is 0.2 m x 0.1 m = 0.02 m2, so hills per square metre = 1 / 0.02 = 50. For one hectare (10,000 m2), plant population = 50 x 10,000 = 5,00,000 hills. If the recommended seed rate is 20 kg/ha, a 0.25 ha plot needs 20 x 0.25 = 5 kg of seed. Writing the units at each step prevents decimal errors.
Traps that cost marks
- Mixing up ahu, sali and boro seasons.
- Applying heavy nitrogen to pulses, which then lodge and yield poorly.
- Treating jute as a food grain or harvesting it after full pod formation, when fibre quality falls.
- Ignoring seed rate and spacing calculations, a common source of lost marks.