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Small-scale farmers in the tropics do not often grow one type of crop on their farms. They typically grow a combination of crops in the same season; this is intercropping. Quite often, researchers recommend to farmers to practice monocropping, but such advice goes unheeded. It would be useful to demonstrate the benefit or otherwise of intercropping in terms of crop yield and the land requirements per unit of yield in order to determine the land equivalent ratio (LER) and income from pure stands and from a combination of sweetpotato with each of these three pulses. Based on current market prices, sweetpotato-groundnut produced the highest income per hectare. Sweetpotato produced 86.6% as much income as sweetpotato-groundnut followed by 60.9% of maximum income with sweetpotato sugar bean. Sweetpotato-cowpea produced 43.8% as much sweetpotato and groundnut. The economic return of pure stand of groundnut, sugar bean, and cowpea was 6.3, 4.5 and 3.9 percent, respectively, of that of the sweetpotato groundnut association. Of the intercropped combinations, sweetpotato-groundnut had the greatest LER of 1.8 followed by sweetpotato-sugar bean at 1.5 and sweetpotato-cowpea at 1.5. Based upon the higher income and LER intercropping sweetpotato with groundnut is recommended preferentially over sugar bean or cowpea.

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