Determinants of agronomic diversification on agricultural crops

Agriculture in Iran is a high risk activity because of weather diversification, dispersion and small farm sizes in the most regions of the country, which leads to useful approaches to confront this situation by farmers. One of the major approaches is the utilization of agricultural diversification. Measurements of crops diversification is calculated by different indexes. Major policy approaches can be adopted by calculating diversification level and effective factors that leads decreasing production risk for strategic and specific crops and increasing production level in the country. For calculating diversification, the Entropy Index (EI) was measured in this article using panel data of wheat, barely, rice, corn and cotton in Eastern Azarbayejan, Khorasan Razavi, Khuzestan, Fars, Kermanshah and Gilan provinces during 1992-2006. Then, effective factors on agricultural diversification were assessed by regression estimation of panel data using Fixed Effects Model (FEM). Results show that assessed effective factors of diversification including crop price, average annual cost of crops, average agricultural and non-agricultural income of urban households, crop insurance, export and import and subsidy have meaningful relationship with Entropy Index. Additionally, it could be helped to food security of the country by precise attention to existed relationships and calculating economical indexes in agricultural production.