The story of Indian agriculture, in particular dryland agriculture, appears as an annoying twist in the plot. The gap
between irrigated and dryland agriculture has steadily widened, with the productivity of the latter being less than half of the
former. Karnataka state has second largest area under rainfed agriculture after Rajasthan. Rainfed agriculture in Karnataka
accounts for nearly 55 per cent of total food grains and 74 per cent of oil seeds production. The present study attempts to
estimate cost-return profile of various crop and non-crop enterprises. Multistage random sampling procedure was adopted to
evaluate the objectives of the study. The Central Dry Zone (CDZ) of Karnataka was purposively selected for the study. The
study is based mainly on the primary data collected from a sample of 100 farmers, selected at the rate of 10 farm households
from 10 villages randomly chosen from five tahsils selected randomly from the selected Zone. The study revealed that, maize,
groundnut and onion were the most suitable crops in terms of soil, water and other resources in the study area which enabled
them to occupy first three ranks with 17.43, 15.11 and 12.96 per cent of the gross cropped area, respectively. Coconut has
provided the highest average net return of Rs.1,69,000 per acre in a year with a B:C ratio of 5.98 followed by pomegranate
(` 1,51,000 and 4.96, respectively). Sheep and goat or the livestock enterprise was the major non-crop enterprises in the dry
zones because of its minimum care requirement, less management cost and high unit returns per year compared to cattle and
buffalo, among others. Diversification of farming by adopting perennials, annual and livestock enterprises is need of the day
to maintain sustainable income in dryland farming.