Agricultural Science Fundamentals: Crop Groups, Seasons and Plant Growth
The Fundamentals domain checks whether you can name and classify crops, place them in the right season, and explain basic plant growth processes. Every later domain assumes this vocabulary, so the marks here are the cheapest on the paper.
Crop groups by economic use
- Cereals: rice, wheat, maize, sorghum (jowar), pearl millet (bajra), barley, minor millets.
- Pulses: chickpea (gram), pigeonpea (tur/arhar), mung bean, urd bean, lentil, field pea.
- Oilseeds: mustard-rapeseed, groundnut, sesame, soybean, sunflower, castor, linseed.
- Fibre: cotton, jute, sunnhemp. Sugar: sugarcane, sugarbeet. Fodder: berseem, lucerne, napier.
Seasons of India
Kharif is sown with the monsoon (June–July) and harvested September–October. Rabi is sown October–November and harvested February–April; it depends on residual soil moisture and winter cold for wheat. Zaid is a short March–June season used for mung, cucurbits and fodder.
Photosynthetic pathway
C3 plants (rice, wheat, cotton, mustard) use RuBisCO directly, so they photorespire and have lower water-use efficiency. C4 plants (maize, sorghum, pearl millet, sugarcane) fix CO2 first as a four-carbon acid and yield more per unit of water under heat.
Worked example
A crop sown in early July, harvested in October, grown for its lint, is: Kharif season, fibre crop, C3 plant - cotton. Reasoning: the sowing-to-harvest window sits inside the monsoon season, the economic product is lint, and cotton runs the Calvin cycle through RuBisCO, so it is C3 despite a tropical habitat.
Traps that cost marks
- Assuming every tropical crop is C4; cotton, rice and groundnut are C3.
- Calling groundnut or soybean a pulse. Both are legumes, but they are classified as oilseeds.
- Mixing Rabi and Zaid crops: mustard is Rabi, cucurbits are Zaid.
- Confusing jowar and bajra names in English and Hindi.