Crop Spacing: A Talk to Primates

There was a time when we were Homo sapiens and now we are Homo sapiens sapiens. If we meet him again, he will definitely ask about agriculture because he was aware of agriculture at that time while we have developed a lot of other technological stuffs. He will first ask why are you growing crop with so much sophistication. Why there is spacing between crop plants. 

"I used to do nothing at my time, nothing at all I only used to sow the seeds in the field and then directly go for harvesting it."

How can I tell him the story of thousands of years at once. The tactics of life, skills for surviving and a well developed, galloping mind we have gained after sequential developmental process of thousands of years. 

"You know, where there are two or more living beings, they will definitely compete for the resources naturally available to them, even though both have enough of these resources."

Like humans do, always competing with one another for resources, happiness even for death.

There exists a competition between plant to plant for all the resources. For sunlight, for space, for water, for nutrients. This behavior is plant to plant interaction. The one who uptake and responds faster is able to win the race, develops rapidly and becomes healthy, tall while the other remain shorter and weak.

The weeds are very good competitor and grows much faster than any other crop plant, and able to suppress the crop plants by shading effect and faster uptake. The time period in which a crop plant faces very stiff competition for resources is crop-weed competition period. If crop plant is able to overcome this period, then only it is able to develop fully. Sometimes, they used to secrete some chemicals which act as suppressor known as allelopethic effect.  There are two type of competition.

(i). Crop-weed competition

(ii). Crop plant-Crop-plant competition

To minimize the plant to plant competition, crop is grown in spacing. The plant to plant and row-row distances are maintained to provide enough resources to plant for their favorable growth. The spacing of plants vary from species to species depending upon their genotype, growth habit and response to environment (mitigation). So, a proper spacing is essential for growing crops which may vary from species to species. The spacing provides maximum possible exposure to sunlight and minimum shade effect on the other crop plants. This helps in more efficient photosynthesis in crop and improves the yield.

Not all plant compete for resources, few supports in growth of main crop showing mutualism. These are companion crops. Sometimes it aims at obtaining maximum yield per unit of resources and such crops are inter-crop and practice is known as inter-cropping.

Now, crop spacing is most popular a general practice worldwide to obtain a good yield from the input resources and playing a very key role in feeding 8 Billion population of this earth. The plant behavior is similar to what shown by Homo sapiens sapiens with different living in this earth both in inter and intra fashion.