Betalbatim is a Coastal Village in South Goa with abundant agricultural land lying uncultivated due to various issues, however the current pandemic situation has brought a change and more and more people are taking interest in agriculture due to job losses in other industries. This has created a unique opportunity to strengthen the agricultural sector in the Village. Here we have tried to estimate the total amount of agricultural land available in our village and the amount of land actually brought under cultivation for the last 5 years by analyzing satellite imagery.
With the advent of free availability of very high resolution satellite imagery extending for over a decade on open source platforms such as google earth it is now possible to uncover details about our environment like never before. As a simple use case we will be monitoring the progress of agriculture in our village.
All the agricultural fields were digitized by geo-referencing the proposed regional plan 2021 for Betalbatim village over the satellite imagery.
Temporal analysis of high resolution satellite imagery pertaining to the area around Betalbatim was carried out by visual interpretation using image elements such as tone, texture and pattern to identify cultivated fields.
About 144 hectares of land under the jurisdiction of Betalbatim Village Panchayat is cultivable land, of this an estimated 47 hectares is currently cultivated which accounts for only 32% of land available for agriculture. Thus uncultivated agricultural land accounts for 68%.
We are now witnessing an agricultural revival of sorts and are expecting the figure of cultivated land in Betalbatim to go up from this year onward, until we achieve 100% utilization of agricultural land .
To be continued.....
