ABSTRACT
Sustainable intensification of agriculture, defined as the capacity to continuously produce more food from less land (Bryan et al., 2014), has been proposed as one of the strategies to mitigate food insecurity in smallholder farming. Intercropping, the simultaneous growth of two or more crops on the same area of land, is widely practised in Africa and elsewhere in tropics as an intensified system. Maize-legume intercropping systems have the potential to improve soil fertility through N fixation (Chowdhury and Rosario, 1992; Ghaley et al., 2005; Hauggaard-Nielsen et al., 2001b), to conserve soil moisture by providing additional ground cover (Jahansooz et al., 2004) and to outcompete weeds (Hauggaard-Nielsen et al., 2001a; Workayehu and Wortmann, 2011). Intercropping is believed to provide insurance in an unpredictable environment, poor soil fertility and unstable market prices.
