Intercropping maize and soybean increases efficiency of land and fertilizer nitrogen use; A meta-analysis

By Zhan Xu, Chunjie Li, Chaochun Zhang, Yang Yu, W. van der Werf, Fusuo Zhang. 2020

273 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Intercropping exploits species complementarities to achieve sustainable intensification by increasing crop outputs per unit land with reduced anthropogenic inputs. Cereal/legume intercropping is a classical case. We carried out a global meta-analysis to assess land and fertilizer N use efficiency in intercropping of maize and soybean as compared to sole crops, based on 47 studies reported in English and 43 studies reported in Chinese. The data were extracted and analyzed with mixed effects models to assess land equivalent ratio (LER) of intercropping and factors affecting LER. The worldwide average LER of maize/soybean intercropping was 1.32 ± 0.02, indicating a substantial land sparing potential of intercropping over sole crops. This advantage increased as the temporal niche differentiation between the two species was increased by sowing or harvesting one crop earlier than the other as in relay intercropping, i.e. with only partial overlap of the growing periods of the two species The mean fertilizer N equivalent ratio (FNER) was 1.44 ± 0.03, indicating that intercrops received substantially less fertilizer N than sole crops for the same product output. These fertilizer savings are mainly due to the high relative maize yield and the lower N input in the intercrop compared to the input in sole maize. This meta-analysis thus shows that exploiting species complementarities by intercropping maize and soybean enables major increases in land productivity with less fertilizer N use. Both LER and FNER increased as the difference in growth duration increased for maize and soybean, but were not affected by fertilizer N rate. LER increased when soil organic matter increased but FNER did not change with soil organic matter.

Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Forestry, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9fc441eb1abc44a1b4e60be77b6ec9b11995ddd8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Agronomy and Crop Science

1. W. van der Werf
2. Chaochun Zhang
3. Yang Yu
4. Fusuo Zhang
5. Jianbo Shen
6. Xiaoyan Tang

In Forestry

1. W. van der Werf
2. Fusuo Zhang
3. Chaochun Zhang
4. Yang Yu
5. Jianbo Shen
6. Xiaoyan Tang

In Plant Science

1. W. van der Werf
2. Jianbo Shen
3. Yang Yu
4. Chaochun Zhang
5. Xiaoyan Tang
6. Fusuo Zhang
7. Long Li

Citations in the corpus

• Intercropping legumes and cereals increases phosphorus use efficiency; a meta-analysis (2020, methodology): “Thus, our dataset was fairly small compared to datasets used in other metaanalyses on intercropping in the literature (Yu et al. 2015; Martin-Guay et al. 2018; Xu et al. 2020; Li et al. 2020a, b), which limits the ability to detect patterns.”