Millet Based Cropping Systems for Enhanced Productivity

Cropping systems are generally planned and accomplished to realize social particularly human objectives consequently, to become a decisive systems. The cropping systems have been intended to maximize the yield, but modern agriculture is progressively concerned with endorsing environmental sustainability. The crop and cropping pattern vary under different agroecosystems. The cropping system necessity is to provide sufficient nourishment for the household, feed for livestock, and make satisfactory cash income for domestic and cultivation incidentals. Having the advantage of short duration, millets very easily fit into cropping systems like multiple cropping, mixed farming, intercropping, sequence cropping, and relay cropping systems. Integration of crop production, diverse farming systems with best conservation measures lead to sustainable production which eventually increase the revenue and towards better livelihoods. Millets are reliably are the hardiest, resilient, and climate adaptable crops for adverse, hot and comparatively dry environments. The droughts are becoming more recurrent in most prominent agro-ecological regions of the globe, here exists a farmer’s necessity to accept farming practices, which have the tiniest influence on the environment although producing adequate quantity to withstand their living. Millet’s cultivation would be the right choice under these circumstances and thorough information about the millet-based cropping systems, prominent millet cropping systems followed in India, and their prospect under alternate land use and fallow system is described in this chapter. Year 2023 is been celebrated as “International Year of Millets” and the importance of millet-based cropping system for enhancement of productivity is more relevant and hence furnished in the chapter.