Use of Crop Diversification Technique for Quantitative Evaluation of Land use in Ahmednagar District in 1960-61 and 2010-11

The area of Forest Cover (FC), Net Sown Area (NSA) Land Not Available for Cultivation (ANC), Fallow Land (FL) and Cultivable Waste (CW) have been converted into percentage to total geographical area are included in agricultural land use. Use of land is an important factor for planning process because of the finite nature of land resource. Ahmednagar district in Maharashtra covered an area of about 17 lakh hectare comprising nearly 73.52 percent area under net sown area in 1971-1972. Bhatia????????s method has been adopted in modified form. The crops having less than five percentages have been excluded from computation. In this research paper four crop-diversification regions have been identified as: 1) Area of high crop-diversification, 2) Area of moderate diversification, 3) Area of low diversification, and 4) Area of very low diversification. The spatial distributional pattern of crop diversification in the district in 1960-61 maximum crop diversifications appears in Rahuri (11.26) taluka and lowest at Shrigonda (24.48) taluka while in 2010-11 maximum crop diversification appears in Kopargaon (09.12) taluka and lowest at Newasa (41.76) taluka.