Abstract

Adilabad district in Telangana, India, has a large proportion of tribal communities that are socially and economically insecure. Their livelihood depends predominantly on mixed crop-livestock systems, which consist of the cultivation of cotton and pigeonpea (legume) with high inputs during the rainy season, and sorghum (staple food cereal) with low inputs during the post-rainy season. Agro-climatic analysis shows that Adilabad is prone to very high climatic risk, thus threatening the livelihood security of tribal farming communities. Adoption of climate-smart, society-acceptable agro-technologies (e.g. suitable crops) is one of the options to mitigate the effects of current and future climatic conditions. Still, many current efforts aiming for agro-technologies transfer have not been impactful.

In this case study, we argue that for effective adoption of novel agro-technologies such as new postrainy sorghum varieties, it is important to take into account not only the complexities of the production environment but also the socio-economic context, together with the first-hand involvement of the local communities. Results gathered during our farmer participatory sorghum cultivar selection highlights that the low yielding indigenous landrace is still preferred by farmers for its grain and stover qualities which over-weights the available high-yielding hybrid sorghum. Our study suggests that farmer-participatory technology selection and/or further development should be a baseline protocol to facilitate the introduction of relevant and sustainable interventions to the farming communities

Keywords: Semi-arid tropics; Low-input agri-system; Mixed crop-livestock systems; Post-rainy sorghum; Agro-technologies

Abbreviations: MCLS=Mixed Crop-Livestock System; SAT=Semi-Arid Tropics