Paper Details

Land suitability is a function of crop requirement and soil characteristics. It is a prerequisite for sustainable agricultural practices. This paper briefly presents the land suitability for Groundnut production. The analysis of the data collected for both climatic elements such as rainfall and temperature, physical and chemical characteristics of soil was obtained through the use of descriptive statistics using SAS of 9.4 version software. The distribution map of each of the soil properties was generated in ArcGIS. The suitability for Groundnut cultivation in Katsina shows that rainfall, elevation, temperature, drainage, erosion, soil depth, pH, OC, OM, and Phosphorus are found within the acceptable suitable class, while those found below average are CEC, TN, EC and ESP. Land suitability class S1 (highly suitable) covers 1328.40 ha which is about 21.19% of the study area; land suitability S2 (moderately suitable) covers 1098 ha, representing 17.53% of the total study area, while land suitability class S3 covers 1767 ha occupies about 28.19% of total area. Furthermore, the N1 (potentially not suitable) class occupies about 851.33ha which take the portion of 13.58%, while the last suitability class N2 (potentially and actually not suitable) is covering about 1223.08 ha which is about 19.51%, and these are areas that scored below average of Groundnut requirement. This land (N2) is affected generally by poor scenery, rock outcrop, complex texture as well as infertile soil. Keywords: Remote sensing, Land suitability, Spatial variability, Sustainable Agriculture, GIS