Economics of Low and Unstable Yield in Rainfed Area and Policy Panacea for the Farming in Northern Karnataka

Abstract

Climate and agriculture are inextricably linked. Climate change is already affecting agriculture, with effects unevenly distributed across the world. Climate change will also have an economic impact on agriculture, including changes in farm profitability, prices, supply, demand and trade. Keeping in view the objective of the study a multistage random sampling procedure was adopted for the selection of the district, taluks, villages and farmers. Dharwad was selected purposively for the present study. The return was more in Greengram is mainly because of lower cost of cultivation especially less use of machine labour. Agriculture is highly depending on climate. Most of the crops respond very quickly to the climate change. During scarce rainfall situation yield of the crops were affected negatively. The variation of rainfall from year to year is mainly due to change in climate parameters like temperature, relative humidity, soil moisture and these changes are mainly because of emission of Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The yield gap of major crops is mainly due to the variation in package of practice followed by farmers, climatic factors, especially impact of climate change and loss of soil fertility. Hence farmers’ needs to observe the climatological changes for harvesting rich dividends endowed with nature for making an agriculture more profitable.