On Some Aspects of the Cropping Behaviour in the Sandy Soils of Bapatla

Abstract

Vast stretches of deep sandy areas occupying nearly 103 square miles exist in the Eastern and Southern portions of Bapatla taluk. There is no large scale cropping excepting raising of paddy and tobacco nurseries in the period June to December under splash irrigation. The water source is from 20' x 20' x 12' deep dug outs or deruvue. As the water table is high water always exist 6' to 9' below ground level during the Punasa' season. Each 'doruvu' commands an area of 15 cents for splash watering and a ryot depending on his family takes up ragi or vegetables in small holdings and cultivates the same with the family labour - Casuarine plantation and cashewnut gardens exist in isolated patches and are generally maintained by land lords who can invest some money till they get return in way of harvest. The soils are very poor in fertility and have very low powers of retaining moisture. Large quantities of ammonium sulphate up to 6 cwts. per acre are generally applied to tobacco nurseries at weekly intervals closely followed by profuse splash watering. With the inception of the college form in 1950 the study on the performance of crops suitable to such areas under rainfed conditions was launched and promising results are recorded for the benefit of the cultivators in the locality - feasibility to tap the sub-soil springs by fixing filtor points for growing vegetable crops in summer was also studied.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.002427

Pages

295 - 298

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.

Keywords