Growing two crops alongside each other has become a successful technique for many rubber plantation farmers to grow tea alongside the rubber trees.
There are major benefits by doing this — for the crops, for the farmer, the local farming communities worldwide, and of course the environment.
A recent study carried out in Southern China highlights the benefits of intercropping rubber and tea.
China has a big problem with land degradation which has been caused by excessive vegetation loss, land clearing, physical, chemical and biological processes, excessive soil erosion and runoff, increased soil temperature, loss of soil organic matter, and rapidly fluctuating temperatures of the micro-climate.
Scientists in China have developed techniques to improve these problematic areas, where one example is intercropping.
Intercropping has been proven to significantly reduce soil erosion, improve the quality of the soil and provide economic benefits to the farming communities. Five provinces in China with monsoon climate successfully grow rubber trees — this is because rubber trees thrive in these conditions.
Rubber trees are very sensitive to reductions in temperature and increased wind. Why tea and rubber grow well together:
Planting times and conditions required for these two plants are very similar.
When rubber and tea are planted together, rubber trees produce rubber latex a year earlier, at 6 years instead of 7 years; obviously a great benefit for the farmers. Tea is not the only crop that can successfully grow alongside rubber trees.
The Chinese farmers also grow the following crops:
- Sweet potatoes
- Maize
- Cassava
- Peanuts
- Coffee
- Pepper
- Sugar cane
- Lemon grass
- Sisal hemp
- Bananas
- Pineapple
- Chinese medicinal plants
The benefits of this type of farming makes much better use of the space with plants of varying heights and widths, this improves the effectiveness of the land and produces high yields of multiple crops. As well as this economic benefit this technique provides huge environmental ones, for example, carbon fixing. To explain this in the simplest terms, a study has been carried out to show that the primary productivity exceeds that of a tropical rainforest. (Hao, 1986)
China is one of many rubber producers and like the majority of these countries the technique of intercropping is common. However, despite India being one of the largest producers of tea and rubber they rarely grow the two crops together. This is likely to change as trials have begun in India and hopefully they will also see the benefits of this type of farming.
Consider natural rubber flooring and support the farming communities worldwide.
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