Gap Analysis and Proposed Methodologies for Estimation of Crop Area and Crop Yield under Mixed and Continuous Cropping under the project “Research on Improving Methods for Estimating Crop Area, Yield and Production under Mixed, Repeated and Continuous Cropping

Abstract

Agriculture is the most important segment of many national economies, particularly those of developing countries. Agricultural statistics are essential for monitoring trends and estimating future prospects for agricultural commodity markets, which can be useful in setting policies involving, for example, price supports, imports and exports and distribution. In particular, reliable and timely availability of crop statistics, namely crop area, yield and production plays an important role in planning and allocating resources for the development of the agriculture sector. The availability and quality of agricultural statistics has been declining in developing and underdeveloped countries. Some countries even lack the capacity to produce a minimum set of data as evidenced by the poor response rates to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) questionnaires (FAO 2010). The Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics is a ground breaking effort to strengthen agricultural statistics. The United Nations Statistical Commission endorsed the technical content and strategic directions of the Global Strategy urging the rapid development of an action plan for implementation (hereafter, Global Action Plan) at its forty-first session, which was held in February 2010. One of the issues identified in the Global Strategy under the component data collection methods is estimating crop area, yield and production in the context of mixed, repeated and continuous cropping. Accordingly, a study entitled “Improving Methods for Estimating Crop Area, Yield and Production under Mixed, Repeated and Continuous Cropping” has been awarded to the Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute, New Delhi by FAO. Under this study, several technical reports are being documented. This report is the second in the series which describes the gap analysis that exists in the context of crop area and yield estimation, and in general, focuses more on crop area and yield estimation in the mixed and continuous cropping scenario. It also includes methods of crop area apportioning under the mixed/intercropping scenario and data collection in field testing countries. Based on the gap analysis, an appropriate methodology for estimation of crop area and crop yield under mixed and continuous cropping has been developed. In particular, the domain estimation approach has been proposed in which various crop mixtures are considered as domains. Different measurement methods are proposed for determining crop area and crop yield. In addition, the sample survey-based approach for estimation of crop area and crop yield is suggested.