Switch from rice to cultivating millet & maize could boost farmer incomes: Study

"Optimised allocations of harvested area can reduce climate-induced production loss by 11% or improve farmer net profit by 11% while maintaining calorie production and cropland area," the authors wrote in the journal Nature Communications.

New Delhi: A new study has found that shifting away from cultivating rice to alternative cereals such as millet, maize and sorghum could help tackle production losses related to climate by 11 per cent, thereby potentially boosting farmer incomes.

Farmers in India are known to prefer harvesting rice for its economic viability. Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh are among the top producers, accounting for a significant fraction of the country's rice production.

However, changes in temperatures and rainfall, increasingly driven by climate change, disproportionately affect rice production, thereby threatening food security in a warmer future, a team of researchers, including those from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, said.

They added that a farmer's decision on how much land area to plant a certain crop is heavily influenced by ups and downs in the crop's price in the market, potentially impacting their income and profit.

"Optimised allocations of harvested area can reduce climate-induced production loss by 11 per cent or improve farmer net profit by 11 per cent while maintaining calorie production and cropland area," the authors wrote in the journal Nature Communications.

"Such improvements would be possible by reducing the harvested areas dedicated to rice and increasing the areas allocated to alternative cereals," they wrote.

The findings of possible income boosts could offer an economic incentive to the farmers and encourage them to shift from rice towards climate-resilient crops, the authors said.

"This research highlights the need for policymakers to consider the economic factors influencing farmers' decisions and to implement policies that promote the cultivation of climate-resilient crops," study author Ashwini Chhatre, associate professor and executive director at Bharti Institute of Public Policy, Indian School of Business, said.

For the study, the team looked at five main cereals grown during the monsoon (kharif) season -- finger millet, maize, pearl millet, rice, and sorghum.

Data on yield, harvested area and harvest price were taken from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Hyderabad.

The findings also highlighted the importance of addressing the present pricing structures -- currently biased in favour of cultivating rice, the authors said.

"Our results demonstrate the importance of cropping patterns and harvested area allocations for achieving co-benefits in production and profit, and for ultimately enhancing the resilience of cereal production to both environmental and economic disruptions," they wrote.

Switching away from cultivating rice has also been suggested in previous studies for preserving groundwater, which is a fast-depleting resource.

Harvesting rice relies heavily on groundwater for irrigation.

A 2024 study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that replacing 40 per cent of area sown with rice with other crops could help recover 60-100 cubic kilometres of groundwater lost since 2000 in north India.