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      Achieving food security and high production of bioenergy crops through intercropping with efficient resource use in China

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          Abstract

          With high rates of food and nonrenewable fossil fuel consumption worldwide, we are facing great challenges in ensuring food and energy security to satisfy the world population. Intercropping, as an important and sustainable cropping practice in agroecosystems, has been widely practiced around the world. Many studies have shown that some plants can deliver high yields when intercropped with other plants. Here, we review the biological mechanisms in improving resource utilization efficiency and illustrate the practical application of intercropping in ensuring food and energy security through improving production. Identifying suitable energy plants for marginal land, land not suitable for food crops growth, is an effective strategy to acquire high production of bioenergy, thus removing competition between the use of land for food and energy. The effective application of intercropping provides a potential pathway for production of food crops and energy plants by improving resource use efficiency and resistance to environmental stress.

          Most cited references48

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          Vegetational Diversity and Arthropod Population Response

          D Andow (1991)
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            Diversity enhances agricultural productivity via rhizosphere phosphorus facilitation on phosphorus-deficient soils.

            Intercropping, which grows at least two crop species on the same pieces of land at the same time, can increase grain yields greatly. Legume-grass intercrops are known to overyield because of legume nitrogen fixation. However, many agricultural soils are deficient in phosphorus. Here we show that a new mechanism of overyielding, in which phosphorus mobilized by one crop species increases the growth of a second crop species grown in alternate rows, led to large yield increases on phosphorus-deficient soils. In 4 years of field experiments, maize (Zea mays L.) overyielded by 43% and faba bean (Vicia faba L.) overyielded by 26% when intercropped on a low-phosphorus but high-nitrogen soil. We found that overyielding of maize was attributable to below-ground interactions between faba bean and maize in another field experiment. Intercropping with faba bean improved maize grain yield significantly and above-ground biomass marginally significantly, compared with maize grown with wheat, at lower rates of P fertilizer application ( 112.5 kg of P(2)O(5) per hectare). By using permeable and impermeable root barriers, we found that maize overyielding resulted from its uptake of phosphorus mobilized by the acidification of the rhizosphere via faba bean root release of organic acids and protons. Faba bean overyielded because its growth season and rooting depth differed from maize. The large increase in yields from intercropping on low-phosphorus soils is likely to be especially important on heavily weathered soils.
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              Use of multiline cultivars and cultivar mixtures for disease management.

              The usefulness of mixtures (multiline cultivars and cultivar mixtures) for disease management has been well demonstrated for rusts and powdery mildews of small grain crops. Such mixtures are more useful under some epidemiological conditions than under others, and experimental methodology, especially problems of scale, may be crucial in evaluating the potential efficacy of mixtures on disease. There are now examples of mixtures providing both low and high degrees of disease control for a wide range of pathosystems, including crops with large plants, and pathogens that demonstrate low host specificity, or are splash dispersed, soilborne, or insect vectored. Though most analyses of pathogen evolution in mixtures consider static costs of virulence to be the main mechanism countering selection for pathogen complexity, many other potential mechanisms need to be investigated. Agronomic and marketing considerations must be carefully evaluated when implementing mixture approaches to crop management. Practical difficulties associated with mixtures have often been overestimated, however, and mixtures will likely play an increasingly important role as we develop more sustainable agricultural systems.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China
                College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China
                College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China
                College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China
                Journal
                Front. Agr. Sci. Eng.
                FASE
                CN10-1204/S
                Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering
                Higher Education Press (4 Huixin Dongjie, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100029, China )
                2095-7505
                2015
                : 2
                : 2
                : 134-143
                Affiliations
                College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China
                College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China
                College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China
                College of Resources and Environmental Sciences, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100193, China
                Author notes
                zuoym@cau.edu.cn
                Article
                10.15302/J-FASE-2015069
                558f621e-77c5-4a8d-843d-637055a8657d
                Copyright @ 2014

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 26 June 2015
                : 10 August 2015
                Categories
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                intercropping,food security,energy security,high production,marginal land

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