Evaluation of Barley-Hairy Vetch Mixed Cropping as Green Manure for Biomass and Nitrogen Production

Abstract

The mixtures of legumes and non-legume cropping after rice cultivation are widely used for green manureproduction in Korea. However, there is little information on how the species proportion may affect land useefficient and green manure quality. In this study, green manure N accumulation and Land Equivalent Ratio(LER) was tested with differential seeding ratios using barley and hairy vetch as a green manure. The speciesproportion influences the biomass production (ranging from 10.74 to 13.34 Mg ha-1) and N accumulation(ranging from 256.3 to 249.7 kg ha-1). The N accumulation in hairy vetch mixed, even at 25% of its fullsowing proportion, was three times higher than that of pure stand of barley. The N accumulation of barleyincreased linearly with hairy vetch proportion on the total biomass. The mixtures were more efficient than thepure crops in terms of biomass production (LER>1) and N accumulation (LER>1). Therefore, this resultssuggest that adopting mixture barley with hairy vetch produce a high amount of biomass with higher qualitycompared with pure stand of barley.