Abstract:
Assessing available land resources for irrigation potential for crop suitability is important to
planningthe development of irrigation and crop production potential. This study was initiated to
assess the land resources potential of the district for irrigation potential suitability for crop
production development by collecting different types of necessary data from a different source by
usinga mixed method of data analysis and interpretations with different types of GIS tools such
as reclassification, overlay, clip, multiple buffer and others to overcome the problem of land use
management and food insecurity. Multi-criteria decision evaluation method was used to evaluate
the physical land characteristics of the study area for surface irrigation. There are techniques,
which were used to the weight and standardized the factors, which are used to evaluate the land
in the study area throughout the pairwise comparison. To identify potential irrigable area, the
factors reclassified into suitable class based on FAO guideline were physical soil property
(texture, depth, and drainage), slope, distance to stream, distance to market and land use land
cover were taken respectively. Accordingly irrigation suitability result were shows, 10716.2ha
(8.1%) very suitable, 60821.2ha (46.2%) moderately suitable, 52236.0 ha (39.7%) marginally
suitable, 7831.6ha (6.0%) not suitable.Secondly, the land in the study area was evaluated for
suitability of groundnut and maize crops by using different factors for both crops. The results
regarding maize were shown that, 65332.6ha (49.6%) highly suitable, 58414.3ha (44.4%)
moderately suitable and only7858.1ha (6%) was not suitable. For groundnut 63963.2ha (48.6%)
highly suitable, 59784.4ha (45.4%) moderately suitable and 7857.4ha (6%) was not suitable.In
general, as the result of the study shows most parts of Limmu kossa district was suitable for
irrigated agricultural production.
