The crop comes up as a thick mass over the entire surface and under ideal conditions can smother out weeds. Except for lime on acid soils, other nutrients are rarely needed. Phosphorus application is recommended in India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh, the crop may be sown as pure or in mixed stand often into a standing rice crop one to two weeks before rice is ready to harvest. Grasspea is reported to add 67 kg per hectare of nitrogen to the soil from symbiosis with Rhizobium sp. It is harvested with sickle or uprooted, left to dry for a few days in heaps and then threshed and winnowed.
Yields are proportional to the seeding rates used.
An average crop at a seeding rate of 40 kg per hectare yields about 925 kg per hectare of pulse and 3.2 metric tons per hectare of forage in India. At the seeding rate of about 14 kg per hectare in mixed cultivation, yield per hectare is about 300 kg of pulse and 0.5 metric tons of straw. Ukrainian experiments with sewage irrigation gave yields of 3120 kg seeds per hectare. The sewage irrigation slightly decreased the 1,000-seed weight, but markedly increased seed N, P, and K concentrations and nutritive values of fresh forage and hay. Mycosphaerella ontarioensis , Peronospora viciae , Pleosphaerulina hyalospora , Uromyces pisi .