Since it started in Pakistan in 2018, Chinese intercropping technology has been helping the country’s agricultural industry. This year, many advances in translation and optimization, especially with cotton, have been realized.
Farmers interested in using the method to produce maize, wheat, sugarcane, and cotton are now being registered by Pakistan’s National Research Center of Intercropping (NRCI). With a special focus on Punjab, NRCI plans to expand the public presentations of their maize-soybean intercropping method to other districts in Pakistan during the next maize sowing season. It has been discovered that more than 1,000 farmers have tested the intercropping method on their own fields, with good production and resource efficiency outcomes.
“Some farmers in Punjab have achieved yields of 10-14 maunds of soybean and 15-18 maunds of cotton per acre, based on early field trials,” Dr. Muhammad Ali Raza, NRCI Director and International Research Fellow at Gansu Academy of Agricultural Sciences (GAAS) informed the reporter.
Promoting a New Method
Especially this year, NRCI has launched an original approach to convince cotton farmers to utilize early February sowing for Bt cotton and soybean strip intercropping, which helps revive Pakistani cotton production in light of the country’s reducing cotton-growing region and yield per acre between 2014 and 2023.
“We have improved cotton-soybean cropping technology, which is essential for Pakistan since in the past, whitefly attacks and pink bollworm infections caused farmers to lose a lot of money, which made some farmers hesitant to plant cotton. However, farmers can increase soybean yields while preserving cotton production by intercropping Bt cotton and soybeans, says Dr. Raza.
the researcher, Dr. Raza, Peking University experts have also given Pakistan high-yield soybean and maize types as well as specific herbicides to control plants in fields where maize and soybeans are interplanted.
