Indian Journal of Soil Conservation

One of the most commonly adopted strategies for addressing environmental degradation in rural areas of the tropics is agroforestry. In and degraded land, plantation of fast growing multipurpose tree species play major role not only in rehabilitation of degraded lands but also increase the net productivity of these lands with proper crop tree combination. Keeping this in view, performance of two rhizomatous crops i.e., turmeric (Curcuma longa) and ginger (Zingibar officinale) was evaluated under rainfed conditions as sole crops and with 15-year old well established stands of forest tree species located at the research farm of ICAR Research Complex for NEH Region, Research Centre, Basar, Arunachal Pradesh. The average illumination below the canopies varied from 72.0 to 79.2% of incident radiation on turmeric and 71.7 to 78.8% of incident radiation on ginger. Turmeric and ginger were cultivated in the inter row spaces of 24 and 12 Multipurpose trees (MPTs), respectively. Turmeric and ginger did not perform well under as many as 18 and 5 MPTs, respectively. Turmeric, in association with nitrogen fixing tree species Alnus nepalensis and Parkia roxburghii did not significantly reduce its productivity. Leaf area and leaf area index (LAI) was significantly higher under A. nepalensis than the sole turmeric crop. However, MPTs had significantly negative effect on the growth and yield attributes of ginger crop. The reduction in yield of ginger ranged from 11.3 to 31.3%. It may be inferred that turmeric cultivation was more profitable than the ginger and both the crops showed highest benefit: cost ratio i.e., 3.10 and 2.36, respectively under A. nepalensis based agroforestry systems in comparison to the other MPT based agroforestry systems.