Classification of Farms into Distinct Typologies for Capturing Diversity and Heterogeneity: A Comprehensive Review

Indian farms are dominated by smallholder farmers who mostly earn their livelihoods by participating in the dominant value chains of the villages. The smallholding farmers contain a great deal of heterogeneity which may be reduced to few distinct farm types with the creation of farm typologies. Such farm typologies may be created with the collection of cross-sectional data from the farms and application of various statistical techniques like principal component analysis (PCA) and agglomerative algorithms. The current paper reviews the evolution of the researches in farm typology and also provides a review of the different methodological approaches used in farm typology researches over the years.