Shifting seasons are reshaping farming in Karnataka’s drylands

In Karnataka’s Raichur district, Mala (name changed) has lost more crops than she can count, yet she keeps sowing. ‘Yeh dharti maa hai; iss saal fasal nahi bhi degi to agle saal zaroor degi (this land is our mother; even if she does not give us crops this year, she surely will next year),’ she says. 

Her words carry both her attachment to the land and the uncertainty that looms over her every cropping season. Like Mala, farmers across Karnataka’s semi-arid districts face increasing climate unpredictability at the most vulnerable points in the agricultural calendar, affecting sowing, flowering, and harvest in ways they did not experience a decade or two ago.

More than 70 years of climate data for Raichur confirm what Mala already knew from experience. Agriculture in Raichur once followed a reliable kharif-rabi cycle (Figure 1). Farmers sowed pigeon pea and cotton with the first monsoon rains in June and harvested them around Deepavali in November. Then, fields were prepared for rabi crops such as pearl millet and groundnut, which were harvested around Ugadi in March. That once-predictable rhythm has broken down, and the traditional crop calendar is no longer a reliable guide.

We analysed India Meteorological Department (IMD) gridded rainfall and temperature data for Raichur from 1951 to 2024 and conducted focus group discussions with farmers across the district. Both point to the same conclusion: heat and rainfall extremes are arriving earlier, clustering more tightly and slipping outside the seasons they once belonged to.

For farmers here, what matters isn’t that the climate is warming, but when the heat arrives. They say that summers now arrive almost a month earlier, narrowing the window for field preparation and sowing before the monsoon breaks. By Ugadi, at the end of March, most borewells (if they have access to one) run deeper or dry up entirely.

Raichur’s climate records confirm this shift. The number of ‘hot days’ (days above 40°C based on long-term percentile calculations in Raichur) has jumped from fewer than 15 per year in the 1950s to more than 50 by 2019 (Figure 2a). Heat is also arriving earlier in the year. March, which recorded almost no hot days before 1990, recorded as many as 10 such hot days by 2016 (Figure 2b).

Farmers say that the monsoon has become unpredictable. A couple of seasons ago, heavy August downpours flattened cotton crops, while unexpected September rains waterlogged fields just as they were ready for harvest.

The climate data agrees, though the picture is more layered. Annual rainfall in Raichur shows a weak, statistically insignificant decline (Figure 3a), but rainfall in July-September – the core monsoon months that sowing and early crop growth depend on – has fallen compared to 1951–1980.  At the same time, short bursts of intense rain have increased during the late monsoon period, around September (Figure 3b). These late rains arrive close to flowering and near harvest for crops like cotton and chilli, leaving farmers with limited ways to respond and causing significant damage. 

Together, this means summers that are harsher, rains that are more erratic, and seasons that are less dependable. Risk is now concentrated at the most sensitive stages of the crop cycle, with heat during sowing and flowering and heavy rain near harvest. When crops fail, farmers migrate to distant cities like Pune and Bengaluru for daily-wage work to make ends meet. An elderly villager whose son frequently migrates says, ‘When there is no rain, both the landless and landholding farmers migrate, as there are no other options (here).’ This juggle between the urban and farming keeps households afloat, but it drains labour from the village and creates vulnerabilities of its own. 

This uncertainty shapes decisions long before migration becomes necessary. Farmers prepare their fields without knowing what kind of season lies ahead, and sowing becomes a gamble of hope against uncertainty. ‘If the rain during the kharif season is too low, we don’t sow rabi crops. Instead, we migrate for labour work,’ says a farmer. Without reliable forecasts, farmers rely on age-old signals: the sighting of nakshatras (rain stars), the timing of festivals, and the predictions of the local ‘chhatri walas’ (weather forecasters).

Both farmer testimony and climate data point toward the same need: a plan for adaptation that treats heat and rainfall as two separate problems, each requiring a different kind of response. 

On heat, the projections are unambiguous. Across 20 global climate models, under both moderate and high-emissions scenarios, the heat signal is consistent. Hot days in Raichur will become more frequent and arrive even earlier in the year. That gives heat-focused adaptation a foundation to plan on. For example, popularising heat-tolerant cotton and chilli varieties, and shifting sowing windows so flowering avoids the peak heat. 

Rainfall is harder to plan for. Model projections cover a wide variety of possibilities, but there is confidence that extreme weather – both dry spells and heavy rainfall days – will increase.  That calls for a different kind of response, built for both extremes at once: field bunding and furrows to manage waterlogging from late-monsoon downpours, mulching and intercropping to hold soil moisture through dry spells, managed aquifer recharge and farm ponds to store water when it does rain, and diversifying crops and livelihoods to spread risk. These are some low- or no-regret interventions that do not require betting on a single version of the future. 

What farmers describe as shifting heat and mistimed rains are not just feelings or recency bias; the climate data reveal the same patterns, decade after decade. Caught between science they cannot access and traditions they cannot fully trust, farmers are navigating the sky as best they can. Yet, every year, they return to their fields, not merely out of habit, but a deep trust in the land.