6. Geospatial Approach for Cropping System Analysis: A Block Level Case Study of Hisar District in Haryana

Agricultural sustainability has the highest priority in all countries, whether developed or developing. Cropping System Analysis is essential for studying the sustainability of agriculture. Crop rotation is stated as growing one crop after another on the same piece of land in different timings (seasons) without impairing the soil fertility. A cropping system can be defined as the cropping patterns and their management to derive maximum benefits from a given resource base under specific environmental conditions. Multiplicity of cropping system has been one of the main feature of Indian agriculture and is attributed to rained agriculture and prevailing socio-economic situations of farming community. Although, it is well known that one of the main advantage of remote sensing satellites is the synoptic and repeated collection of data which facilitate to map multi-year cropping patterns and crop rotations. In the present work, crop rotation and long term changes monitoring in cropping pattern along other spatial and non-spatial collateral data have been done with the help of satellite data at block level of Hisar district of Haryana. Multi-date IRS LISS-III data of different seasons for the year 2007–2008 have been used for the study. Cropping pattern maps of Rabi, Kharif and Summer season have been understood to know the spatial distribution and associations between crops or crops and uncultivated land in the same fields (although not in a particular order of sequence).