Q- (a) How can crop variety improvement methods come to rescue of farming facing the repeated crop failure? Describe three factors for which they would do crop improvement.
(b) Which is the most common method of obtaining improved variety of crops? Explain briefly.
Answer- (a) At earlier time the crop variety improvement is very necessary for farmers as most of the farmer faces loss. Thus all was due to crop failure.
To resolve the issue of crop failure various methods were taken. Mainly there are two ways to solve this issue:
1. Selection
2. Hybridisation
On the other hand there are three main methods through which they decrease chances of crop failure. These are as follows:
1. Mixed cropping: Mixed cropping is the process of growing two or more types of crops together in the same field or piece of land.
2. Intercropping: Intercropping s a method in which two or more types of crops are grown or cultivated simultaneously in definite row pattern.
In this method the row pattern would be 1 : 1, 1 : 2 or 1 : 3.
3. Crop Rotation: Crop rotation can be defined as process in which more or less regular recurrent succession of different crops on the same piece of land. In other words the process in which different types of crops are grown alternately in the same fields is known called as crop rotation.
(b) The most common method of getting improved variety of crop is selection and hybridisation.
The selection must have started from primitive time period. This practice was done by primitive people to improve crop variety. Selection is also of two type: Natural selection and Artificial selection.
Hybridisation is the process of crossing of two plants differing from each other genotypically in one or more traits.
There are some main objectives of hybridization. These are as follows:
1. Hybridisation is done to produce a single kind of variety having combination of good dominant characters.
2. To increase and generate the genetic variations through recombination.
3. Hybridisation is used to exploit and utilize the hybrid vigour.