Screening Soybean (Glycine max (L) Merr.) Germplasm for Spring Summer Cultivation

Abstract

Soybean as a spring-summer crop has a great potential in India. It can serve two vital purposes. It can provide sustainability to rice-wheat cropping system, which is followed in an area of around 9 million ha and is facing problem of declining factor productivity due to its high energy demand, nutrient deficiencies, build-up of pests and deterioration in physical conditions ofsoil. Secondly, it can bring additional area under soybean cultivation to narrow down the current gap of 8 million tonnes that exists between the production of soybean in the country and the installed processing capacity of the soybean oil processing industry (Lal, 2001).