Soil Condition as affected by Cropping in the Bulk Soil Area of the Tinnevely District

Abstract

The ryot of the black soil tract of the Tinnevelly and Ramnad districts adopts usually the following rotation:-Fodder cholam (Andropogon Sorghum),cotton.(G.indicum gammie),Cumbu(Pennisetum typhoideum).and Cotton:whenever cotton follows cumbu.the yield is normal,but it is depressed when coming after a fodder cholam crop.Actually the figures collected from 1905 onwards show that the yield of cotton after Irungu(the variety of cholam grown)is about 15% less than that after cumbu.The results of an investigation of this phenomenon.arried out under a scheme financed by the Indian Central Cotton Committee,showed that the growth of fodder cholam tended to alter the physical condition of the soil.After the cholam crop,the soil oftn turns out in clods under the plough.cracks but little,and has been observed to be considerably less permeable than after cumbu.A sarch for the more obvious agencies such as depletion moisture.soil exhaustion etc.having proved fitile.it was surmised that the adverse alteration of soil condition induced by cropping was responsibl for the poor yield of the subsequent cotton crop.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.002191

Pages

355 - 359

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

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