How has scientific literature addressed crop planning at farm level: A bibliometric-qualitative review

Crop planning (CP), being the core of farm management and decision-making, remains significant as the selection and allocation of appropriate crops determine the economics and sustainability of farming system. A systematic literature review was conducted to obtain a structural overview and consolidate the knowledge from CP literature, given the dearth of review articles in this domain.

The methodology included systematic selection of literature in phases and mixed-method systematic review process consisting of bibliometric analysis and qualitative review. This enabled an understanding the main characteristics of CP literature and answer how CP has been addressed at farm level.

1516 publications were selected in first phase after which 652 were screened using bibliometric analysis software, VOSviewer and CiteSpace, in second phase to identify research hotspots and recent trends. Optimization, irrigation, sustainability, adaptation were certain hotspots, while a shift in research trend was observed from decision support, crop allocation and bioenergy to climate change, water resources and big data. Last phase focussed on qualitative review of 31 publications on farm. Three broad themes of articles emerged namely “farmer's decision-making”, “soil-water-agroecology” and “merits of innovative technologies”. The study proposed several recommendations for small farming systems which were largely ignored in literature. These include factorial design for crop combinations, choices in options, estimation of crop diversity index and relative time-dispersion in yields. The current review produced a macroscopic overview of accumulated knowledge on CP and provided future directions to harness the unexplored potential in this field.