**6. Land diversification and value addition**

As we have already discussed that sewan grass lives more than 20–25 yielded up to 10–15 years but due to modernization in agriculture i.e. heavy grazing, mechanization, and economically important crop dependency of farmers sewan grass is being disappeared from the farmer's field and limited at wasteland areas. Therefore, there is need to conserved sewan grass and continuously supply sewan forage to the livestock. That can possible through land diversification that means to use land efficiently by growing sewan grass with arable crops without affecting the yield of both grass and arable crops. Strip cropping of sewan grass with arid legumes helps to conserved and maintains yields of both crop and grass. Another way to utilize the non-cultivable forest areas the planting sewan by adopting advanced production technologies and soil moisture measures. Thus, sewan can be used in diversification




#### **Table 4.**

*Environmental features and Agronomic practices for sewan grass production.*


#### **Table 5.**

*Alternate land use system with Lasiurus sindicus.*

*Sewan Grass: A Potential Forage Grass in Arid Environments DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98801*

and resource conservation in arid tract of Rajasthan. Sewan grass can be used as hay and silage during lean period when fodder is not available for livestock. The silage is a good quality fodder and can be fed to the animals during the off-season. An experiment conduced at CAZRI, Jodhpur and results revealed that quality silage of sewan fodder can be increased by adding 1–2% urea, 10% juggary and 4% starter culture (*Lactobacillus* culture) [41]. Sewan grass hay can be utilized as an excellent feed for dairy cattle that can be prepared by harvest at the proper physiological stage of growth and well cured to 20 per cent or less moisture.

An experiment conduced at CSWRI, Bikaner and results revealed that dry matter consumption through sewan hay was found to be higher than *C. ciliaris* hay where as digestibility of dry matter was lower in sewan hay than *C. ciliaris* [42].

### **7. Breeding efforts and achievements**

Plant breeding deals with principles and procedures to improve the genetic constitution of crop species based on two basic principles such as creation of variation and selection. Naturally occurring variations in sewan grass already exist due to its cross-pollinated nature. Diversity existing among the germplasm help to select the diverse parents that help to introgression or combine the trait of interest into the elite cultivar [44] which can be estimated by clustering approaches such as Metroglyph analysis [45], D2 statistics [46], Principal Component Analysis (PCA) [47] and molecular markers. Sewan grass is used for fodder purposes so that forage yield is the economically important complex or super trait. Direct selection for yields *per se* cannot be very effective. The study of inter-relationships is necessary for understanding the association of component traits with complex characters. Generally positive association between yield and component traits is beneficence for crop except maturity and anthesis traits in arid region otherwise it is advisable to break linkage drag between traits which made be possible through various population improvement strategies i.e. recurrent selection and its modifications, Disruptive selection mating and Marker-assisted recurrent selection, genomic selection, Genome editing methods etc. Now a day, in sewan grass, recurrent selection method and its modifications are being popularized for population improvement and varietal development. A lot of effort is still required to move applications for plant breeding beyond the experimental scale in sewan grass; however, Yadav and Krishna [48]; Shekhawat et al. [49]; Sanadya et al. [44, 50, 51]; have been screened large number of accessions of sewan grass for yield and its component traits and revealed that tillers number and dry matter yield are those characters showing high amount of variation and green fodder yield showed strong positively significant correlation with spike length, tillers number and dry matter yield. Sanadya et al. [50] have classified large number of sewan grass accessions into seven clusters using the Metroglyph method and Sharma et al. [11] grouped sewan grass accessions into five clusters using RAPD and ISSR markers. Chowdhury et al. [52, 53] found *nifH* gene in the rhizospheric region of sewan grass and also studied on diversity of 16sRNA and reported that sewan grass roots have been affiliated with a few of the nitrogen fixation bacteria *i.e. Pseudomonas pseudoalcaligenes*, *Azospirillum brasilense*, *Rhizobium* sp., and uncultured bacteria.

## **8. Conclusion**

Arid zones are known to be fragile ecosystems in which various grasses have been introduced that tolerate high temperatures and low rainfall (below 250 mm) such as buffel-grass (*Cenchrus ciliaris*), birdwood grass (*Cenchrus setigerus*), marvel grass (*Dichanthium annulatum*), khavi grass (*Cymbopogon jawarancusa*), bermuda grass (*Cynodon dactylon*), wire grass (*Eleusine compressa*), sewan grass (*Lasiurus scindicus*), pan dropseed (*Sporobolus marginatus*), *tantia* (*Dactyloctenium sindicum*), halfa grass (*Desmostachya bipinnata*) etc. among them sewan grass is more popular because of good nutritive value and soil binder properties. This grass can be intercropped with other grasses, arid-legumes and desert trees with numerous alternate land use systems such as Agri-Pastoral system, Horti-Pastoral system, Silvi-Pastoral system and Agroforestry to complete, ecologically sustainable livelihood system. Although salt tolerance, drought tolerance, soil binder, nitrogen fixation, alternate land use system, ecofriendly nature, good palatilibity and high digestibility for livestock still plant breeders are not showing interest to popularize it to be farmers.

There are many reasons behind low popularization of sewan grass on farmer's field such as sewan grass found in extreme areas (high temperature), modernization in agriculture, cultivation of economically important crops, researches limited to agronomic perspective, limited R & D, seeds are very low weight and environmental conditions are highly variable (sandstroms), poor education and awareness, overgrazing, low profitable than economic important crops, uneven pod setting, non-synchronous maturation, present land utilization does not permit any more good land to be put for fodder production, and no governmental policies for conservation of sewan grass germplasm. Therefore, to meet both present and future demands, policies need to be supportive of the development of these traditional Agroforestry systems. Sewan grass has numerous qualities such as lodging resistance, drought tolerance, C4 grass, associated with beneficial bacterial colonies but still facing negligence from scientist communities. Therefore, these traits can be utilized for germplasm enhancement and it is mentioned earlier that intercropping of sewan with other crops and trees or shrubs also help to prevent soil erosion and maintain soil fertility. There is needed to be popularized fodder of sewan grass to the farmers so that can conserve sewan grass germplasm and generate extra income for their livelihood. If improvements could be made in forage quality, especially more high yield varieties with good nutrition, then potentially huge improvements in the animal production can be made. In conclusion, utilizing the information obtained from the research effort to improve grain crops and the knowledge gathered from model systems like *Brachypodium* and setaria, offers an excellent future perspective for improving the nutritional quality and yield for forage crops. The sustainable or ecological intensification of grass-based food production systems provides an opportunity to align the ever increasing global demand for food with the necessity to re-green ruminant production. Still integration of traditional breeding with modern approaches are missing in sewan grass therefore, modern genetics should be quickly integrated into the current conservation, use and improvement strategies to address nutritional quality and palatability concerns, in sewan grass.

*Sewan Grass: A Potential Forage Grass in Arid Environments DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98801*
