Investment and Crop Diversity: An Empirical Evidence from Rural-Urban Interface of Bengaluru

The study was undertaken in North of Bengaluru to analyse the investment pattern, crop diversification and farm household’s income across rural-urban interface. The required data was collected from randomly selected 80 farmers each under rural, transition and urban gradients. Tobit regression was used to determine the drivers of investment and Herfindahl index was used to capture the extent of crop diversification across rural urban interface. The per farm investment was relatively higher on water resource and irrigation structure across all the gradients. Around 56, 51 and 45 percent of farmers have invested on water resource and irrigation structures in transition, urban and rural gradient, respectively followed by animal husbandry (40% in rural gradient) and plantation and horticulture (25% in transition and urban gradients). There has been an investment led crop diversification from food crops to vegetables, flower and fruit crops in rural gradient between 2014 and 2019. Whereas, in transition and urban gradients, diversification was from food and vegetable crops to high value fruit crops during the same period. During 2019, the extent of diversification was more in transition (0.21) and rural (0.25) gradients compared to urban (0.29) gradient. Age of head of family, farm income and borrowed capital were the chief drivers which significantly affected the investment in agriculture. The study concludes that, investment led high value crops cultivation and crop diversification played significant role in augmenting the farm income leading to improvement in farmer’s welfare assuring food and livelihood security.