Agricultural intensification: a viable option for food availability and sustainability

The land available for agriculture to feed the population that is growing geometrically, has reduced drastically due to urbanization. This has led to the use of arable land for industrial purposes. Industrialization has reduced the arable land available for agriculture to feed the ever growing population. To remedy this situation and ensure that the people don’t starve, there is the need to intensify agriculture by adopting a cropping system that utilizes the available resources on the land by increasing input on that available land to bring about increase output. Intercropping is one of the methods of intensifying agriculture. It involves the growing of two or more crops on a particular piece of land for efficient use of the resources available in that land for increase productivity. for a successful intercropping enterprise, there is the need to have knowledge of crop management techniques like spacing, spatial arrangement, planting density, varietal selection, understanding the physiology of the plants to be grown together, their growth habits, canopy and root architecture, water and nutrient use in order to manage interaction that occurs in favour of the component crops. This review tends to study the role of plant spacing, spatial arrangement, plant density, plant architecture in agricultural intensification for food sustainability and availability.