ABSTRACT
Lentil is an important food legume in the semi-arid regions of the world where it can be grown successfully on limited soil moisture and in relatively poor soils. Despite successful production in marginal areas, food legumes are noted as being unresponsive to efforts to substantially increase yields when compared to the cereals. The inability of lentil and pulses in general to keep pace with cereals in terms of yield is often blamed on the fact that pulses and particularly lentils are most often produced in marginal areas characterized by poor soils and receive minimal inputs of land preparation, fertilizers, weed control, irrigation, mechanical planting and harvesting needed for optimum production. In addition, research efforts devoted to legume crops and particularly lentil are small when compared to more generously supported efforts in cereal crops. In spite of these constraints, steady progress has been made in yield per unit area; while production in extensive agricultural systems of North America and Australia has expanded world production of lentil. As Fig. 1 shows, lentil production held steady during the 1990s but increased substantially at the turn of the century with expanded area sown, with most of the increase coming from expanded production in Canada, Australia and the United States where yields are generally higher than the world average. Of these three countries, Canada now accounts for nearly 40%
of world lentil production (Fig. 2). Production in these developed countries benefits from mechanized land preparation, sowing, effective weed control, timely harvesting and readily available storage facilities.
