Pea-Canola-Mustard Intercrop
Manitoba Pulse & Soybean Growers Association – Daryl Domitruk
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada – Dr. Syama Chatterton, Lethbridge AB
1. Evaluation of pea-canola or pea-mustard intercrop for biological control of pea diseases and
weeds
2. Influence of intercropping system involving brassicas on pea grain yield, land equivalence ratio
and protein content
Intercropping systems consisting of legume and non-legume crops can have a significant number of benefits. They add diversity to the cropping system, resulting in production stability by reducing risk of crop failure. Many studies have shown that a successful intercropping system can reduce input costs by reducing fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide requirements and thus increase economic returns for mustardpea or barley-pea intercrops (Malhi, 2012). An intercrop involving canola and pea has also been shown to reduce aphid populations in pea. Another benefit of intercropping is that it can result in out-yielding, whereby, the yield produced by an intercrop is greater than yield produced by component crops when grown in monocrop from the same land area, this has been proven in cereal-legume or oilseed-legume intercrop systems (Jetendra and Mishra, 1999). Out-yielding can be determined using various methods
but the most common one is land equivalence ratio, which is defined as the relative land area under mono crops that is required to produce yields equivalent to intercrops. Intercropping systems involving pea and mustard are known to increase economic returns by increasing land equivalence ratio to >1 in most cases (Waterer et al., 1994). Higher land equivalence ratios in intercrops maybe due to weed suppression and lower susceptibility to pests and diseases which may result in higher yields (Malhi, 2012). Weed suppression by crops such as mustard may be due to production of allelochemicals that impede growth of weeds. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of intercropping pea with canola or yellow mustard on yield, disease incidence, insect pests, weeds, grain quality and economic returns.