Breeding for intercropping: join applied genetics and agronomy for improved annual legume production

Abstract

Archaeology offers evidence that growing plants together, with annual legumes as usually inevitable component, could be the most ancient cropping system in all primeval agricultural centres. With a ten millennia long tradition, intercropping annual legumes, usually with cereals and for diverse uses, has remained important all over the world until today. There is a phenomenon that brings together legume breeders and agronomists: both are aware that there are differences in the agronomic performance of the mixtures of annual legumes and other field crops if diverse annual legume cultivars are used. Wishing to understand this phenomenon properly and define its economic significance, we are establishing a firm interaction between breeders and agronomists, in order to design such annual legume ideotypes that would have the best agronomic performance when intercropped with diverse plants for either forage or grain or biomass or any other use. Our major hypotheses are that the ideotypes for intercropping are the genotypes being the most competitive in the same environment compartments or taking profit of the complementary compartments.