9th Class (CBSE) Science: Improvement in Food Resources

Question: What are the advantages of inter-cropping and crop rotation?

Answer: Advantages of using inter-cropping:

1. It helps to maintain soil fertility.
2. It increases productivity per unit area.
3. Save labour and time.
4. Both crops can be easily harvested and processed separately.

Advantages of using crop rotation:

1. It improves the soil fertility.
2. It avoids depletion of a particular nutrient from soil.
3. It minimise pest infestation and diseases.
4. It helps in weed control.
5. It prevents change in the chemical nature of the soil.

Question: What is genetic manipulation? How is it useful in agricultural practices?

Answer: Genetic manipulation is a process of incorporating desirable (genes) characters into crop varieties by hybridisation. Hybridisation involves crossing between genetically dissimilar plants. This is done for production of varieties with desirable characteristics like profuse branching in fodder crops, high yielding varieties in maize, wheat, etc.

Genetic manipulation is useful in developing varieties which shows:

1. Increased yield
2. Better quality
3. Shorter and early maturity period
4. Better adaptability to adverse environmental conditions
5. Desirable characteristics

Question: How do storage grain losses occur?

Answer: The factors responsible for loss of grains during storage are:

1. Abiotic factors like moisture (present in food-grains), humidity (of air) and temperature.
2. Biotic factors like insects, rodents, birds, mites and bacteria.

Question: How do good animal husbandry practices benefit farmers?

Answer: Good animal husbandry practices are beneficial to the farmers in the following ways:

1. Improvement of breeds of the domesticated animals.
2. Increasing the yield of foodstuffs such as milk, eggs and meat.
3. Proper management of domestic animals in terms of shelter, feeding, care and protection against diseases.

Which ultimately helps the farmers to improve their economic condition.

Question: What are the benefits of cattle farming?

Answer: Cattle farming is beneficial in the following ways:

1. Milk production is increased by high yielding animals.
2. Good quality of meat, fibre and skin can be obtained.
3. Good breed of draught animals can be obtained.

Question: For increasing production, what is common in poultry, fisheries and bee-keeping?

Answer: Through cross breeding, the production of poultry, fisheries and bee-keeping can be increased.

Question: How do you differentiate between capture fishing, mariculture, and aquaculture?

Answer:

1. Capture fishing: It is the fishing in which fishes are captured from natural resources like pond, sea water and estuaries.
2. Mari-culture: It is the culture of fish in marine water. Varieties like prawns, oysters, bhetki and mullets are cultured for fishing.
3. Aquaculture: It is done both in fresh water and in marine water.

Question: What are the major group of activities involved for improving of crop yields?

Answer:

1. Crop variety improvement
2. Crop production improvement
3. Crop protection improvement