India is the fourth largest oilseed economy in the world. Among the seven edible oilseeds cultivated in India, rapeseed-mustard contributes 28.6% in the total oilseeds production and ranks second after groundnut sharing 27.8% in the India’s oilseed economy. The mustard growing areas in India are experiencing the vast diversity in the agro climatic conditions and different species of rapeseed-mustard are grown in some or other part of the country. Under marginal resource situation, cultivation of rapeseed-mustard becomes less remunerative to the farmers. This results in a big gap between requirement and production of mustard in India. Therefore site-specific nutrient management through soil-test recommendation based should be adopted to improve upon the existing yield levels obtained at farmers field. Effective management of natural resources, integrated approach to plant-water, nutrient and pest management and extension of rapeseed-mustard cultivation to newer areas under different cropping systems will play a key role in further increasing and stabilizing the productivity and production of rapeseed-mustard. The paper reviews the advances in proper land and seedbed preparation, optimum seed and sowing, planting technique, crop geometry, plant canopy, appropriate cropping system, integrated nutrient management and so forth to meet the ever growing demand of oil in the country and to realize the goal of production of 24 million tonnes of oilseed by 2020 AD through these advanced management techniques.

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Rhizosphere microbiome significantly influences plant growth and productivity. Legume crops such as pea have often been used as a rotation crop along with rice cultivation in long-term conservation agriculture experiments in the acidic soils of the northeast region of India. It is essential to understand how the pea plant influences the soil communities and shapes its rhizosphere microbiome. It is also expected that the longterm application of nutrients and tillage practices may also have a lasting effect on the rhizosphere and soil communities. In this study, we estimated the bacterial communities by 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing of pea rhizosphere and bulk soils from a longterm experiment with multiple nutrient management practices and different tillage history. We also used Tax4Fun to predict the functions of bacterial communities. Quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) was used to estimate the abundance of total bacterial and members of Firmicutes in the rhizosphere and bulk soils. The results showed that bacterial diversity was significantly higher in the rhizosphere in comparison to bulk soils. A higher abundance of Proteobacteria was recorded in the rhizosphere, whereas the bulk soils have higher proportions of Firmicutes. At the genus level, proportions of Rhizobium, Pseudomonas, Pantoea, Nitrobacter, Enterobacter, and Sphingomonas were significantly higher in the rhizosphere. At the same time, Massilia, Paenibacillus, and Planomicrobium were more abundant in the bulk soils. Higher abundance of genes reported for plant growth promotion and several other genes, including iron complex outer membrane receptor, cobalt-zinc-cadmium resistance, sigma-70 factor, and ribonuclease E, was predicted in the rhizosphere samples in comparison to bulk soils, indicating that the pea plants shape their rhizosphere microbiome, plausibly to meet its requirements for nutrient uptake and stress amelioration.

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