Seasonal crop calendar

Nowadays the approaches taken for the development of rural India is mainly bottom-up approaches rather than the top-down approaches. In such cases, PRA is a perfect data collecting method. There are different tools of PRA for different types of data collection. Seasonal crop calendar is one of them.

During Data collection in village

The rural area cannot be developed by any component but agriculture. Seasonal crop calendar tries to take the data about the agricultural habit of the villagers throughout the year in different seasons. It is better than the old schedule methods, because PRA takes the data from the villagers and by the villagers. To involve them all in the data collection from a meeting we can make some colorful methods with the locally available resource. Then we can divide them into three groups and then the each group is given a season ( summer, monsoon, and winter) they have to least the name of crops what they grow in the particular season, the data of each group is cross checked by the two others (triangulation). Thus we can involve all villagers and can avoid the biases.

Farmers as a teacher

My working pattern on this tool in the village:

The villagers divided their agriculture year into three subparts and according to the season, they make a layout of crop calendar. I just make them understand that what I want to know and provide the materials for layout.

As the layout of villagers was not so clear we make an understandable copy of it.

Crops Cultivated by Farmers of Anjan:

Kharif Season	Rabi Season	Zaid Season
Paddy, Black gram, groundnut, cowpea, sweet potato, brinjal, bean, tomato, chilly etc.	Wheat, rice, Bengal gram, potato, tomato, cauliflower,    green gram, coriander etc.	Rice, onion, bottle gourd, cowpea, okra etc.