Burning Seasons: El Niño, Heat Stress, and the Future of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh Agriculture

Inaugural Session of the Digital Farm School Series: 2026

📅  4th June, 2026  |  Thursday                    🕐  3:00 to 4:30 pm IST

💻  CSA Zoom and YouTube |🔗  Free to attend | Zoom link shared with registered participants only 🌍  Telugu

Context

Telangana and Andhra Pradesh’s farmers are no strangers to heat. But the summers they are now navigating -longer, more intense, and increasingly unpredictable -are of a different character. El Niño, the periodic warming of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean, has repeatedly disrupted the South-West monsoon over peninsular India, bringing erratic onset, prolonged dry spells, and pre-monsoon temperatures that are rewriting what a farming season looks like.

The consequences are visible in the field. Kharif sowing windows are narrowing. Crops that once performed reliably -cotton, paddy, red gram -are yielding less or failing altogether in drought-stressed years. Groundwater tables are falling. And the burden of adaptation falls almost entirely on small and marginal farmers who have the least room to absorb it.

What makes this moment particularly urgent is not just the heat itself, but the mismatch between how agriculture across both states has been structured and what the climate now demands of it. Monocultures, input-intensive systems, and shallow-rooted cropping patterns designed for a more predictable climate are showing their limits. The question before farmers, extension systems, and policymakers is no longer whether agriculture must adapt -but how, at what cost, and who leads that transition.

At CSA, two decades of working with farming communities across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh have built a body of field-tested evidence on what resilience looks like in practice: diversified farm systems, improved soil health, reduced external input dependency, and farmer-led knowledge on crop management under stress. This session draws on that evidence -and on questions that have come through the Kisan Mitra helpline from farmers across both states -to examine what the El Niño era means for the region’s agriculture and what a realistic, farmer-centred path forward looks like.

What we will discuss

This session will examine the intersection of climate volatility, crop performance, and agricultural change in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. Dr GV Ramanjaneyulu will unpack:

• What El Niño means for the farm calendar across both states -heat accumulation, monsoon disruption, and growing season risk
• Which crops and cropping systems are most vulnerable to heat and moisture stress -and which are showing resilience in the field
• How small and marginal farmers are already absorbing the costs of shifting seasons and unreliable yields
• What agroecological farm management practices can buffer against climate-driven losses
• What a transition away from climate-vulnerable, input-intensive agriculture could look like -and what it would require
• Farmer questions from the Kisan Mitra helpline -answered

→ Registration link: Click here to register

Who should attend

This session is designed for a broad audience -anyone who engages with the challenges of farming under climate stress, whether from the field, the lab, the NGO sector, or the classroom.

• Farmers and farmer collectives, including women farmers and FPOs
• NGOs and civil society organisations working in agriculture and rural development
• Researchers and agricultural scientists
• Extension staff, KVK personnel, and field consultants
• Students and educators in agriculture and environmental studies
• Policy professionals and development practitioners

About the speaker

G.V. Ramanjaneyulu

Founder & Executive Director, Centre for Sustainable Agriculture (CSA)

Dr GV Ramanjaneyulu is an Agricultural Scientist specialising in agroecology and sustainable farm management. As Executive Director of CSA, he has led the development and field-scale implementation of Non-Pesticidal Management (NPM) across India, with deep roots in farming communities across Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. His work on climate resilience, soil health, and ecological crop management spans two decades and thousands of farms. He brings both the rigour of peer-reviewed research and the grounding of long-term field engagement to questions of agricultural transition under climate stress.

About Digital Farm School

Digital Farm School is a public knowledge platform from the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, designed to give farmers, FPOs, women farmers, youth in agriculture, extension staff, civil society organisations, and students access to scientifically grounded, field-tested, context-specific agricultural knowledge in their own language. The platform is built on the conviction that farmers deserve the same quality of evidence-based knowledge that any professional deserves in their own work.

This is the inaugural session of the 2026 series. Questions and field experiences can be shared through the Kisan Mitra helpline, WhatsApp, or live during the session.

🏥 Watch the previous session conducted about El Niño