Wei Dongyang, Castro Leslie Guadalupe, Chhatre Ashwini, Tuninetti Marta, Davis Kyle Frankel
Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA.
Department of Ecosystem Science and Sustainability, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA.
Nat Commun. 2025 Mar 2;16(1):2108. doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-57420-6.
The rising homogeneity of global crop supply has increased vulnerability to climatic and economic disruptions. While substantial work has examined yield variations in relation to climate variability, little is known about the influence of harvested area on production stability. To investigate this, here we take the example of monsoon cereal production in India, which has steadily shifted towards climate-sensitive rice and away from alternative cereals (finger millet, maize, pearl millet, and sorghum). We find that variations in harvested area are significantly associated with current and past price fluctuations for all cereals except rice. This suggests that farmer decisions based on economic factors may exercise great influence in determining variations in harvested area. We also show that optimized allocations of harvested area can reduce climate-induced production loss by 11% or improve farmer net profit by 11% while maintaining calorie production and cropland area. Such improvements would be possible by reducing harvested areas dedicated to rice and increasing areas allocated to alternative cereals. Our findings show that strategies using harvested area to address cereal yield fluctuations and improve farm profits could complement ongoing efforts to improve alternative cereal yields and stabilize cereal production.
全球作物供应同质化程度的不断提高，增加了对气候和经济干扰的脆弱性。虽然已有大量研究探讨了产量变化与气候变异性的关系，但对于收获面积对生产稳定性的影响却知之甚少。为了对此进行研究，我们以印度的季风谷物生产为例，该国的谷物生产已稳步转向对气候敏感的水稻，而不再种植其他谷物（黍、玉米、珍珠粟和高粱）。我们发现，除水稻外，所有谷物的收获面积变化都与当前及过去的价格波动显著相关。这表明，农民基于经济因素做出的决策可能对决定收获面积的变化产生重大影响。我们还表明，在维持卡路里产量和耕地面积的同时，优化收获面积分配可将气候导致的生产损失降低11%，或将农民净利润提高11%。通过减少用于种植水稻的收获面积，并增加分配给其他谷物的面积，就有可能实现上述改善。我们的研究结果表明，利用收获面积来应对谷物产量波动并提高农场利润的策略，可以补充当前为提高其他谷物产量和稳定谷物生产所做的努力。
