S U M M A R Y Experiments with fanners' traditional practice of growing cereals with groundnuts demonstrated that the system consistently produced greater cash returns than sole-crop groundnuts. Increasing the proportion of cereal, and incorporating maize in addition to sorghum and millet, increased cash returns even further.Agricultural research in the developing tropics has been conditioned by the cropping systems of more developed countries, whence came most research workers, and until recently rather cursory attention has been paid to indigenous cropping systems. Attempts to improve production by the application of technology developed from temperate concepts of farming systems have, in the main, failed (Williams, 1972;Baker, 1975), not because of inefficient extension or farmers' conservatism but because it had not been realized that subsistence agriculture is a tropical agro-ecosystem (Jantzen, 1973), albeit at a low level of production, and not simply a collection of crops and animals to which one can apply this input or that and expect immediate results. Rather, it is a complicated interwoven mesh of soils, climate, plants and animals, with the strands held and manipulated by a man called 'the farmer'. His unique understanding of his immediate environment, both natural and social, applied by means of a sequential decision-making strategy for each situation, creates his farming system.A lack of appreciation of the very personal nature of the subsistence farmer's farming system had resulted in a tendency for research to produce solutions to the wrong problems. For example, most agricultural research in the developing tropics is directed towards increasing production under sole cropping (a predominantly temperate system), instead of asking how to increase production under mixed cropping (which is the dominant system of tropical subsistence farmers). That mixed cropping is dominant has been shown by Norman (1972a) who listed 24 different crops being grown in 174 different crop enterprises in one sample area of Northern Nigeria alone. Less than 17% of those enterprises consisted of sole crops.Because of the importance of mixed cropping Norman (1972b) attempted to rationalize the system on the basis of flexibility of labour use and risk, and showed that labour was more uniformly used through the season, and variability of annual return was less, than with sole cropping.In this (and subsequent) papers I shall attempt a rationalization on the grounds of improved productivity and profitability, compared with equivalent sole crops, '9
Alternate row mixtures of millet, maize and sorghum were compared with equivalent areas of sole crops. Yield of mixtures were rarely reduced but there was a gain when components differed by a certain margin in height or age at maturity, or both. Approximately 75% of variation in yield gain from mixing was attributable to these two factors. Subsistence farmers who mix a fast-growing early-maturing cereal with a slower-growing, later-maturing one thus reduce interference between neighbouring plants during the reproductive phase of growth, and obtain grain harvest spread in time and heavier than from equivalent areas of the component sole crops.Earlier papers (Baker, 1978(Baker, , 1979 described mixtures of cereals with groundnuts or cotton, both of which are common around Samaru ( n° n ' N , 7 0 38'N). This paper describes mixtures of different cereals, one of which (millet and sorghum) accounts for some 18% of all mixed cropping found in the area (Norman, 1972).Subsistence farmers in North Nigeria sow millet very early with the first rains at wide spacings along ridges approximately 1 m apart. A long-season sorghum may be inter-sown later, depending upon their policy for that year as rains become more reliable. Farmers thus adopt the strategy of growing a low population of a short-season millet on early, unreliable rainfall, followed by a full stand when a long-season sorghum is sown after the rains have established, leaving a reduced population (after the millet has been harvested) to mature on stored soil moisture at the end of the season.In the experiments described here the strategy of using different sowing dates was not adopted. Instead, all cereals were sown at the same time, with fertilizer and a high population, to determine whether an 'improved technology' with mixed cereals would give yields equivalent to sole crop cereals, since it has been said that mixed cropping is only of value at low levels of management (Fisher, 1977a). The value of mixed cropping to subsistence farmers must include averting risk and spreading labour (Norman, 1972), the latter being a strong reason why they have resisted recommendations for sole cropping (Baker, 1975).There are two main forms of mixed cropping; superimposition of one crop on another, as with cereals/cotton (Baker, 1979) or maize/beans (Fisher, 1977b) where the total plant population per unit area is higher than when either crop is grown sole; and replacement mixtures, where various proportions of one crop replace the same proportion of another. The mixtures of cereals described here were replacement mixtures, all cereals being represented in equal proportions within each mixture, in three series of experiments from 1974 to 1976.
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