CropSelection-Introduction

The land suitability assessment provides the suitability or otherwise of the various land resources occurring in an area for major crops grown. This helps to find out specifically the suitability of the land resources like soil-site characteristics, water, weather, climate and other resources and the type of constraints that affect the yield and productivity of the selected crop.

This assessment is based on the model proposed by Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO, 1976 and 1983) to assess the resources of an area for specific land use/crop. In this assessment, the specific requirements of a crop (compiled from the existing literature) are compared with the characteristics of land and suitability of the area for the crop is arrived at based on the matching. If the land characteristics of an area match the requirements of the selected crop then the area is considered as suitable for the crop, otherwise it is grouped as not suitable for the crop. The site-specific land resources database generated through LRI helps to establish the suitability of the resources to any selected crop for the area in a very objective manner, which was not possible earlier with general datasets.