OC-8.1: Change in diversity of farmers' crop production

Owned by Enrico Bonaiuti
May 05, 2020
2 min read

Definition: This indicator will track diversity of farmers' crop production at farm-level. Only cultivated crops will be considered in the computation of the diversity index. It thus excludes other plants that are part of the farm vegetation. It also excludes livestock/animals.

Unit of Measure: Percentage

Disaggregated by: Geographic location (sub-national, national), agro-ecological zone

Method of Calculation:
Step 1: Compute the Shannon diversity index
Shannon Diversity Index (SDI)=i=1n-Pi×lnPi
Pi is the proportion of a particular crop type and n is the total number of crop types on the farm, as measured by size of land area allocated.
Step 2: Compute the change in the shannon index across the reporting periods (applicable to all but the first reporting period)
Change in diversity=SDItn-SDItoSDIto×100
t0 denotes the first reporting period (e.g baseline) and tn denotes subsequent reporting periods (e.g mid-term, end-term).
Additional notes: The farmers should be helped to estimate the proportion of individual crops by using appropriate visual aids and illustrations. This is will be even more important for mixed crop production systems.

Data sources: Farm households

Data collection method: Farm household surveys

Data collection and reporting responsibility: Program leaders, project leaders, project M&E focal point persons

Data Collection and Reporting Frequency: Annual, bi-annual, baseline, mid-term, end-term

Evidence required:

Rationale: This metric is a proxy for farm risk reduction (e.g market price fluctuation risk) and diversity of farm household diets.

Comments and limitations:

  • Crop diversity is often a proxy for risk reduction (diversifying crops speads risks), but in particular context this may have some trade-off with productivity.

  • It is possible that some farmers with less diverse crop enterprises are better off through specialization and the associated efficiency gains, resulting in higher margins/income that they may use to diversify their diets among other benefits. The extent to which this indicator can be used as proxy to diversify of farm household diets is thus dependent on the accuracy of this analogy that farm households with specialized crop production tend not to increase their expenditure on diversified diets.

  • This indicator insufficiently captures the context of the farmers' crop production such as if the farmer is practicing crop rotation.