Over the years, horticulture has emerged as an indispensable part of agriculture, offering a wide range of choices to
the farmers for crop diversification. Its role in the country’s nutritional security, poverty alleviation and employment
generation programmes are becoming increasingly important. It offers not only a wide range of options to the
farmers for crop diversification, but also provides ample scope for sustaining large number of agro-industries which
generate huge employment opportunities. Gujarat has a wide variety of soils, rainfall pattern, temperature regimes,
and irrigation availability. This diverse agro-climatic situation across the state holds promise for development of the
horticulture sector in a significant way. The paper explores such horticultural trend over the period of seven years.
Based on the trend it also tries to suggest the top five crops in each segment like fruits, vegetables, spices and
flowers, for pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities.

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