Vegetable grafting – A Boon for soil-borne pest and disease management- A Review

Abstract

ABSTRACT India is the second-largest populous country after China with an estimated population of 1.31 billion as of now and it will reach 1.7 billion by 2050. Moreover, the growing world population is projected to reach approximately 8.4 billion by mid-2030 and 9.7 billion in 2050. Hence, Agricultural productivity must increase by 60% to feed the expected population and it must be achieved through a socio-environmental sustainability of the natural resources. However,vegetable production around the world is being increasingly hampered by the unfavorable soil and environmental conditions that include abiotic constraints such as drought, extreme temperature, salinity, flooding, low nutrients, organic and heavy metals contamination, as well as biotic ones as soil-borne pests and diseases. This situation is aggravated by successive cropping, environmental policies, as the phase-out of the chemical soil disinfectants, and negative impacts of climate change. While, genetic breeding cannot always provide efficient solutions to mitigate the aforementioned problems. Nowadays Grafting is regarded as a rapid alternative tool to the relatively slow breeding methodology. The production and cultivation of grafted solanaceous and cucurbitaceous plants are ever increasing across Asia, Europe, and North America due to its ability to provide tolerance to biotic stress and abiotic stresses. However, the appropriate rootstock and scion cultivars and grafting techniques must be chosen with care to avoid post grafting losses due to incompatibility. This review discusses the source of potential rootstocks in solanaceous and cucurbitaceous vegetables to mitigate various biotic stresses, grafting techniques/methods and graft compatibility studies towards the improvement of vegetable production.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.2019.000330

Pages

561 - 570

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