According to the FAO, an increasing number of people are going to bed hungry, and more than a billion people are known to be nutritionally poor (Swaminathan 2010). Agroecology-based intercropping – growing more than one crop at the same time on a given piece of land – is now regarded as a promising approach
for addressing food security in an environmentally and socially sustainable way (Brooker et al. 2015; Duchene et al. 2017). Many studies have shown that intercropping provides greater resource use-e!ciency, reduced soil erosion and nutrient losses, and improved soil moisture (Maitra 2020; Triveni et al. 2017). Water is arguably the single most important factor that limits crop production in agriculture, particularly in rainfed or dryland ecosystems, and a consideration of plant hydraulic lift of soil water may help in designing a sustainable intercropping system (Liste and White 2008).