
	Asian Journal of Crop Science
	Year: 2020 \| Volume: 12 \| Issue: 2 \| Page No.: 57-62 DOI: 10.3923/ajcs.2020.57.62

Herbage Mass Productivity and Composition of Weeds in the Mixed Forage Maize-cowpea Field

Swotantra Dangi, Shanker Raj Barsila

, Bijay Sapkota, Badrika Devkota, Naba Raj Devkota and Tugay Ayaşan

Abstract: Background and Objective: The agrestal weeds as a source of forage is a common tradition in some of the tropical countries. A study was done to quantify the effect of different seed rate of maize (Zea mays L.) with a fixed stand of cowpea on herbage mass productivity and chemical composition of forage mixture and weeds. Materials and Methods: A Completely Randomized Block Design (RCBD) consisting of 4 treatments of maize seed rate, replicated 5 times with a fixed stand of cowpea as intercrop was designed. The herbage dry matter productivity and proximate composition were studied for the herbage harvested at 45 and 75 days after seeding (DAS), respectively. Data analysis was performed by following the analysis of variance (ANOVA) model using GenStat (version 15) software. Results: The harvesting time had an effect (p<0.05) on herbage-mass productivity of the forage mix, total weed mass and the total biomass, respectively. A maize seed rate of 50 kg ha^–¹ had rather the highest total herbage mass productivity (924.2 t ha^–¹) at 75 DAS. The harvesting time had a significant effect to almost all of the proximate components except the total minerals content of the weeds, whilst seed rate of maize had affected (p<0.05) the total mineral content of the forage mix. Conclusion: The research results had shown that weeds could be a valuable and additional forage resource to the conventional maize-cowpea intercropping system as had been shown from herbage mass and rather comparable and almost unchanged crude protein (CP) and total mineral at a later stage of harvest.

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How to cite this article:

Swotantra Dangi, Shanker Raj Barsila, Bijay Sapkota, Badrika Devkota, Naba Raj Devkota and Tugay Ayaşan, 2020. Herbage Mass Productivity and Composition of Weeds in the Mixed Forage Maize-cowpea Field. Asian Journal of Crop Science, 12: 57-62.

DOI: 10.3923/ajcs.2020.57.62

URL: https://scialert.net/abstract/?doi=ajcs.2020.57.62

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