Competition Effects and Productivity in Oat–Forage Legume Relay Intercropping Systems under Organic Farming Conditions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article “Competition effects and productivity in oat–forage legume relay intercropping systems under organic farming conditions “explains oat competition with forage crop by following intercropping and mono-cropping systems. The research paper is good and well written and addressing the effects of legume intercropping under organic farming system. The results revealed that plants competition at initial stages of oat crop did not has significant effects on grain yield and nutrients uptake under relay intercropping system. Oat is a best weed suppresser crop. The article is a good draft and need major revision to reshape it before publication by addling all these comments and suggestions.

Abstract

Please add the specific results in abstract instead of writing the general findings.

Introduction

Introduction part is written good. Add some points in it.

Line 28 Improve sentence structure and add “are” after legumes instead of “is”. 

Material and methods

This section is quite good and all adopted procedure details are written with standard references.

Line 119, check the space in sentence BBCH 87-89

Results and discussions

Line 169. Heading of table 2, need corrections?

Fig.2, it will be good if SE can be added in the bar graphs?

Graphs are not given idea about comparison among treatments. Please improve the graphs.

Line 200 Improve the sentence structure.

Table 4, please mention the names of nutrients and specify them?

Fig.5. can authors revised the scale on x axis may be from 2.9 or 3.0?

Discussion section also need to further improve by more focusing on the study objectives.

Conclusions

The conclusion also need to improve it.

Author Response

Thank you for the review. We agree with all the comments and corrected them.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript present very relevant topic dedicated to intercropping system.

The authors highlighted the effect of competition both in title and conclusion, however they missing consider competition indices in methodology section  and results.

I suggest to add one or two indices of competition, so as to properly presenting the plant competition effect in implementing crop mixture.

The other suggestion and inquires are marked in pdf.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you for the review. We agree with all the comments and corrected them.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Looks majority of the comments have been added and improved than previous.