Cropping Systems for Sustainable Millet Production

Millets play a vital role in achieving nutritional security especially under areas of rainfed. Millets are hardy crops which can even be grown in arid lands, need lesser rainfall, and can withstand higher temperatures. With having the advantage of short duration, they very easily fit into cropping systems like, multiple cropping, mixed farming, intercropping, sequence cropping, and relay cropping systems. Integration of crop production, different farming systems with best conservation measures of soil and water lead to sustainable production increase in income levels and towards better livelihoods. In Indian agriculture, three cropping systems are majorly used. They are mono-cropping, Inter-cropping, and multiple cropping. Millets are consistently dryland crops and are the hardiest, resilient, and climate adaptable crops for adverse, hot, and dry environments. With droughts becoming more frequent in some parts of India’s most prominent agro-ecological regions, there exists a farmers need to adopt farming practices, which have the least impact on the environment but still producing enough quantity of crops to sustain their livelihood. Millet’s cultivation and Sustainable organic farming came into existence in this place. The detailed information about the basic concept of cropping system, millet-based cropping systems, prominent millet cropping systems followed in India, and their possibility in alternate land use and fallow system is described in this chapter.