Effects of silage maize and feeding millet intercropping on their yield

To find a new planting mode to improve the yield and land use efficiency of silage maize and forage millet, this experiment took silage maize ‘Zhengdan 958’, ‘forage millet 1’, and ‘forage millet 5’ as materials, set four planting modes in random block experiment, and measured plant height, stem diameter, photosynthetic performance, and yield of crops at each growth stage. The results demonstrated that the plant height, leaf area index (LAI), and chlorophyll content of silage maize were significantly increased under the intercropping mode of silage maize with forage millet compared with the mono-cropping mode. The maximum cytology yield and biological yield were 142.05 t·ha⁻¹ and 42.72 t·ha⁻¹, respectively, when the intercropping ratio of silage maize with ‘forage millet 1’ was 2 ꞉ 4. The highest cytology yield was 142.05 t·ha⁻¹ under the planting mode MS24, and the yield was 36.59% and 34.57% higher than that under the intercropping mode MS24 and MS44. The results demonstrated that corn-millet intercropping could improve their respective yields, and corn ꞉ millet 2 ꞉ 4 intercropping ratio could get better results.