article · Cogent Food & Agriculture
In the Ethiopian Highlands, land degradation from intensive cultivation and mismanagement lowers agricultural productivity. A geographic information system multi-criteria evaluation assessed land suitability for wheat and barley in the Andit Tid watershed to match crop requirements with available resources. The assessment revealed that 77.42 percent of the watershed, or 266.55 hectares, is moderately suitable for both crops. Only 2.43 hectares, representing 0.51 percent, is classified as highly suitable. Marginally suitable land accounts for 9.3 hectares, and 3.6 hectares are not suitable. Key limiting factors identified include soil depth, soil texture, temperature, slope, and erosion hazards. A spatial mismatch exists between current agricultural practices and land capacity, as farming is predominantly situated on marginally suitable land in the lower watershed, indicating a need to modify land-use patterns.
Agricultural productivity in highland regions often declines when intensive farming occurs on fragile or unsuitable terrain. Identifying physical constraints, such as erosion risks and poor soil depth, enables local planners and communities to allocate crops more sustainably. Aligning cultivation with true land capability helps prevent ongoing land degradation and supports long-term food security in areas where national economic growth relies heavily on farming.
This spatial assessment provides applied decision-support evidence that regional agricultural extension officers, land-use planners, and local governance bodies can use to guide crop zoning and soil conservation programmes. While tested and directly relevant to the Andit Tid watershed, wider deployment as a planning tool across other regions would require local environmental data inputs and calibration to site-specific conditions.
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Land evaluation is a foundation for sustainable land resource planning and management. In Ethiopia, national economic development is highly dependent on agriculture. And, the productivity of the land is low as a result of land degradation due to mismanagement of the land and intensive cultivation; this situation is worse in Ethiopian Highlands like Andit Tid watershed. Therefore, matching crop requirement with resource available through land suitability analysis has become an urgent need to sustain the productivity of agricultural land in the study area. This study aimed to address land suitability analysis by using geographical information system-based multi-criteria approach in Andit Tid watershed. The analysis of land suitability for major crops (wheat and barley) revealed that, though, there are slight variation in suitable classes for each crop, most part of the watershed was moderately suitable for both crops with 266.55 ha (77.42%) and only very small part of the land 2.43 ha (0.51%) was highly suitable for both crops. On the other hand, 9.3 ha (2%) and 3.6 ha (0.77%) of the land was marginally suitable and not suitable for both wheat and barley crops, respectively. The main limiting factors for land suitability were soil depth, texture, temperature, slope and erosion hazard. The spatial distribution showed that most of the cultivation currently practised in marginally suitable land in the lower part of the watershed. Most of the land parcel being used against its suitability potential in study area. Thus, land-use pattern needs to be modified based on its suitability potential.
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DOI: 10.1080/23311932.2018.1470481
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