Vol. 9, Issue 11 (2020)

Author(s):
Santhoshini Chinta, CH Satyanarayana, M Srinivasa Reddy, T Raghunandan and DBV Ramana

Abstract:
Dairy farmers’ adaptive options to climate variability in Southern Telangana zone, an ex-post facto research design was adopted with a multistage random sampling method. Six mandals from each district of Mahabubnagar and Nalgonda were selected purposively based on climate variability data and two villages from each Mandal were selected by simple random sampling technique. Based on the available dairy farmers’ population in the selected villages, 10% of the sample size (254 respondents) from 24 villages in 12 mandals of Southern Telangana zone was selected for the study. The study revealed that, to combat the effect of climate variability, dairy farmers in Southern Telangana zone were practicing various feeding, breeding, health care, management related and other climate variability adaptive options. To find the relative importance among the adaptive options, an exclusive climate variability adaptation index was developed and based on this index ranking has given to the dairy farmers’ adaptive options to climate variability. It was observed that providing the shelter, mixed farming followed by selling of few animals from the herd to meet emergency expenses during extreme climatic events were the most preferred climate variability adaptive options in the study area.