Crop Production Practices and Agronomic Operations
What this domain tests
The operation sequence from land preparation to harvest - tillage, seed rate, sowing method, spacing, plant population, interculture and cropping systems.
Core rules
- Tillage: primary tillage (plough) breaks the hardpan and inverts soil; secondary tillage (harrow, cultivator, rotavator, leveller) produces a fine, level seedbed. Black soil needs shallow summer ploughing once in a few years, not repeated deep ploughing.
- Plant population per hectare = 10,000 / (row spacing in m × plant spacing in m).
- Sowing methods: broadcasting, drilling, dibbling, transplanting and ridge-and-furrow sowing. Transplanting suits paddy, onion, chilli and tomato; dibbling suits cotton and other wide-row crops.
- Interculture: thinning to one healthy plant per hill, gap filling within 7–10 days, weeding during the critical period, and earthing up in sugarcane, cotton and maize to support roots and cover placed fertilizer.
- Cropping systems: sequential (rice–gram), intercropping (cotton + tur in 6:1 or 8:1 rows), relay and mixed cropping. Cropping intensity = (sum of cropped area / net sown area) × 100.
Worked example
A hybrid maize crop is to be sown at 60 cm × 20 cm. Reasoning: area per plant = 0.60 × 0.20 = 0.12 m²; plants per hectare = 10,000 / 0.12 = 83,333. With a 1000-grain weight of 250 g, seed mass = 83,333 × 0.25 g = 20,833 g ≈ 21 kg/ha. Allowing 90% germination raises this to about 23 kg/ha, and a further field-establishment margin takes it to roughly 25 kg/ha.
Traps
Quoting a seed rate without stating spacing, test weight and germination; earthing up before fertilizer placement; intercultivating wet black soil and destroying structure; and confusing cropping intensity with yield or with cropping pattern.