Crop Production and Management: Cereals, Pulses, Oilseeds, Vegetables and Horticulture
This domain asks you to match a crop to its season, seed rate, spacing and water need, and to justify that choice. Expect calculations of plant population or seed rate alongside descriptive questions on nursery raising and orchard management.
Field crops
- Cereals (rice, wheat, maize) are grown mainly for carbohydrate. Rice is transplanted or direct-seeded; wheat needs cool winter weather; maize is grown in kharif or rabi depending on the zone.
- Pulses (gram, lentil, mung, arhar) fix atmospheric nitrogen through Rhizobium; seed must be treated with the correct inoculant before sowing.
- Oilseeds (mustard, groundnut, sunflower, sesame) respond to sulphur and boron and need timely harvest to limit shattering.
Vegetables and horticulture
Vegetables split into cool-season crops (pea, cauliflower, carrot) and warm-season crops (brinjal, okra, cucurbits). Horticulture adds nursery management, transplanting, training and pruning. Grafting joins a scion to a rootstock selected for vigour, soil adaptation or disease resistance; pruning balances vegetative growth against fruiting.
Worked example
Maize sown at 60 cm x 25 cm. Area per plant = 0.60 x 0.25 = 0.15 m2. Plants per hectare = 10,000 / 0.15 = 66,667. Reasoning: one hectare is 10,000 m2, so divide that by the ground area occupied by one plant. To get a seed rate, multiply plant population by test weight, then divide by germination percentage and purity percentage when the seed lot is not perfect.
Traps that cost marks
- Calculating seed rate from spacing without correcting for germination and purity.
- Swapping kharif and rabi crops.
- Treating pulse inoculation as optional and adding nitrogen fertilizer instead.
- Assuming that closer spacing always raises yield; beyond an optimum, competition lowers it.
- Confusing transplanting with direct seeding when describing rice.