Crop diversification for climate resilient agriculture: Opportunity and challenges

Abstract

Crop diversification is an effort to increase crop diversity by temporal and spatial cropping system to enhance productivity, sustainability and maintain the ecological balance. It is recognized as one of the most feasible, cost-effective and rational ways of developing resilience to the changing climate. Adoption of crop diversification can help to increase the income of small landholder farmers, conservation of natural resources, many agronomic benefits in pest management by breaking insect habitats and disease cycles, reducing weeds and soil erosion, and conserving soil moisture. The major challenges observed for the adoption of crop diversification are; maximum cropped area of the country is dependent on rainfall, sub-optimal and over-use of resources like land and water,
inadequate supply of seeds and improved plants materials, fragmentation of land holding and inadequate post-harvest infrastructure for perishable produce.