Friday, August 28, 2009
A Cambodian farmer, plows in the rice paddy at Prey Kla village, Kampong Speu province, some 35 kilometers (22 miles) south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Friday, Aug. 28, 2009. (AP Photo/Heng Sinith)Friday, 28 August 2009
Written by Michele Cempaka
Asia Sentinel (Hong Kong)
A Jesuit priest transforms centuries-old growing practices
The traditional methods that Asian farmers have used for hundreds of years to grow rice are beginning to give way to what its supporters say are new, environmentally healthier and more productive practices developed in Madagascar by Henri de Laulanie, a Jesuit priest, in the 1980s.
SRI – the universal acronym for what de Laulanie called System of Rice Intensification – didn't begin to spread out of Madagascar until about 1999. But in the past 10 years, farmers from China to India to Indonesia and the Philippines have begun to shift to the new method, which paradoxically involves planting fewer and younger seedlings, spaced wider apart, and using less water than Asian farmers have used for centuries.
The new method is not without its critics, who say it is difficult to replicate dramatically higher yields outside the original plantings in Madagascar. Nonetheless, SRI is estimated to have spread across 400,000 hectares of Tamil Nadu in India. Some 30,000 farmers in Indonesia now practice SRI, more than 100,000 in Cambodia; over 50,000 in Myanmar; 223,000 last year in Vietnam and around 5,000 in Laos. Some 20,000 farmers in the Philippines are estimated to be using SRI.
By changing the management of plants, soil, water and nutrients, SRI is roughly doubling per-hectare yields, which are now about 3.8 tonnes per hectare, according to a 2004 paper by Norman Uphoff, an emeritus professor and director of the Cornell Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development in the United States and SRI's chief advocate.
"When the methods are applied well and so improve the soil, yields can reach 15-20 tonnes per hectare," Uphoff wrote. "SRI practices improve the growing environment of the plant so that any rice genotype can result in different, more productive phenotypes having much larger root systems."
Indonesian farmers, for instance, traditionally have transplanted three-week old seedlings or older, then flooded the fields in a system of irrigation called subak, which also involves intensive fertilizer and chemical pest control agents that cause nitrogen run-off. Fertilizer has long been identified as the dominant source of nitrogen, which is creating "dead zones" where rivers meet the sea.
That is because nitrogen run-off contributes to eutrophication – depletion of oxygen in water which results in the growth of algae, decomposition of other aquatic plants and the death of deep-dwelling fish. The water becomes scum-covered and foul smelling as well as unfit for drinking. Some studies indicate that adults risk contracting a variety of cancers and young infants may develop the potentially fatal 'blue baby syndrome', where their red blood cells cannot function properly, and fail to deliver sufficient oxygen.
The Indonesian government, which subsidizes fertilizer heavily, is pushing for the switch to SRI with the help of a non-government organization called the PPLA. Farmers in eastern Indonesia under a Japanese-funded project cut their fertilizer application by 50 percent compared to what was recommended by the government, according to a paper by Uphoff and a colleague, S. Sato, in 2007. With reduced fertilizer use and a 40 percent reduction in water use, farmers' yields increased by 78 percent (3.3 tonnes/hectare) on average, the two wrote.
"The government has been spending about Rp200 trillion yearly on subsidized fertilizers and they just can't do it any more. With SRI, no fertilizers are needed and the yield is much greater than with conventional irrigation methods," says Chakra Widia, a permaculturist and farmer who has been using SRI on his own rice fields in Bali since 2005.
Seed upgrading is extremely important. And with SRI, it doesn't involve the enormously costly proprietary seedlings developed by agrochemical transnational corporations, which patented genetic modifications and force farmers to buy new seedlings every year.
Chakra Widia has a simple, traditional test to find the best seed:
"First you get a tall jar and fill it with water, then put a fresh duck egg in and begin adding salt up to 1.5 kilos until the egg rises to the top. Remove the egg and put the seeds in the water. The seeds that sink to the bottom are the best. By selecting a good seed it reduces the energy required for managing pest control." Widia says.
Widia estimates that 15 – 20 percent of Bali's farmers now use SRI although many farmers continue to resist the switch, especially those who have much more fertile land and a good water supply. Farmers who are struggling with water scarcity in arid areas are more open to switching. In the Katik Lantang, Singakerta area of Bali, farmers say they drove up rice production from 7.4 tonnes per hectare to 12.2 tonnes with SRI.
"SRI rice is much heavier than other rice because there are fewer empty grains," Widia says. "It's also much healthier because the roots are stronger and go much deeper compared to conventionally farmed rice."
But an even greater motivation for reluctant farmers to make the switch is that SRI-grown rice is much more profitable. A 2007 study showed that the final profit based on one hectare using SRI rose to Rp6.04 million compared to Rp3.7 million profit from conventional farming methods.
That isn't to say Sri doesn't have its skeptics. One of them is Thomas Sinclair, a plant physiologist at the Agriculture Research Service in the US Department of Agriculture, who writes that SRI "runs directly counter to well-established principles for high crop growth. These principles were developed over many years of careful testing and scrutiny by scientists worldwide, and they have stood the test of time."
SRI's low plant densities, Sinclair wrote, are a problem because energy for crop growth results from intercepted sunlight, and the amount of light intercepted translates directly into plant growth. High plant density enhances light interception, growth and yield. SRI suffers from poor light interception because of low plant densities. Ample water, he writes, maximizes rice yields, and flooded paddy fields assure that no water limitations develop. Third, he says, SRI faces a serious challenge in obtaining sufficient mineral nutrients from organic sources to achieve high yields and without sufficient nitrogen, those yields are not possible.
Other studies, including one by professors at Cornell, found that "there is still no evidence that SRI out-yields best management practices beyond Madagascar." Achim Dobermann, head of research at the highly respected International Rice Research Institute, has also been quoted as saying the claims for SRI are exaggerated.
Nonetheless, the Indonesian Agency of Agricultural Research and Development (AARD) and its Rice Research Center in Sukamandi, West Java in 2008 reported that dry-season SRI paddy yields were 6.2 tonnes per hectare compared to the control yield of 4.1 tonnes, and that in the subsequent wet season, the SRI plot yielded 8.2 tonnes/ha.
There are some acknowledged pitfalls. Since rice is the same family as grass, SRI crops can be riddled with weeds and difficult to manage. Some farmers complain that it's much harder for them to harvest SRI, because the roots are a great deal more resilient than traditionally farmed rice crops.
"The main pitfall we have positively identified is damage from root-feeding nematodes when farmers switch to aerobic soil conditions. But that depends on the existence of such populations in the soil already. Most nematodes are not root-feeding but rather are beneficial or neutral. SRI also requires more labor during the learning phase, but becomes labor saving over time," Uphoff said.
In practice, SRI involves some combination of the following changes in rice cultivation practices. These practices are as follows:
Michelle Cempaka is a Bali-based journalist.
The traditional methods that Asian farmers have used for hundreds of years to grow rice are beginning to give way to what its supporters say are new, environmentally healthier and more productive practices developed in Madagascar by Henri de Laulanie, a Jesuit priest, in the 1980s.
SRI – the universal acronym for what de Laulanie called System of Rice Intensification – didn't begin to spread out of Madagascar until about 1999. But in the past 10 years, farmers from China to India to Indonesia and the Philippines have begun to shift to the new method, which paradoxically involves planting fewer and younger seedlings, spaced wider apart, and using less water than Asian farmers have used for centuries.
The new method is not without its critics, who say it is difficult to replicate dramatically higher yields outside the original plantings in Madagascar. Nonetheless, SRI is estimated to have spread across 400,000 hectares of Tamil Nadu in India. Some 30,000 farmers in Indonesia now practice SRI, more than 100,000 in Cambodia; over 50,000 in Myanmar; 223,000 last year in Vietnam and around 5,000 in Laos. Some 20,000 farmers in the Philippines are estimated to be using SRI.
By changing the management of plants, soil, water and nutrients, SRI is roughly doubling per-hectare yields, which are now about 3.8 tonnes per hectare, according to a 2004 paper by Norman Uphoff, an emeritus professor and director of the Cornell Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development in the United States and SRI's chief advocate.
"When the methods are applied well and so improve the soil, yields can reach 15-20 tonnes per hectare," Uphoff wrote. "SRI practices improve the growing environment of the plant so that any rice genotype can result in different, more productive phenotypes having much larger root systems."
Indonesian farmers, for instance, traditionally have transplanted three-week old seedlings or older, then flooded the fields in a system of irrigation called subak, which also involves intensive fertilizer and chemical pest control agents that cause nitrogen run-off. Fertilizer has long been identified as the dominant source of nitrogen, which is creating "dead zones" where rivers meet the sea.
That is because nitrogen run-off contributes to eutrophication – depletion of oxygen in water which results in the growth of algae, decomposition of other aquatic plants and the death of deep-dwelling fish. The water becomes scum-covered and foul smelling as well as unfit for drinking. Some studies indicate that adults risk contracting a variety of cancers and young infants may develop the potentially fatal 'blue baby syndrome', where their red blood cells cannot function properly, and fail to deliver sufficient oxygen.
The Indonesian government, which subsidizes fertilizer heavily, is pushing for the switch to SRI with the help of a non-government organization called the PPLA. Farmers in eastern Indonesia under a Japanese-funded project cut their fertilizer application by 50 percent compared to what was recommended by the government, according to a paper by Uphoff and a colleague, S. Sato, in 2007. With reduced fertilizer use and a 40 percent reduction in water use, farmers' yields increased by 78 percent (3.3 tonnes/hectare) on average, the two wrote.
"The government has been spending about Rp200 trillion yearly on subsidized fertilizers and they just can't do it any more. With SRI, no fertilizers are needed and the yield is much greater than with conventional irrigation methods," says Chakra Widia, a permaculturist and farmer who has been using SRI on his own rice fields in Bali since 2005.
Seed upgrading is extremely important. And with SRI, it doesn't involve the enormously costly proprietary seedlings developed by agrochemical transnational corporations, which patented genetic modifications and force farmers to buy new seedlings every year.
Chakra Widia has a simple, traditional test to find the best seed:
"First you get a tall jar and fill it with water, then put a fresh duck egg in and begin adding salt up to 1.5 kilos until the egg rises to the top. Remove the egg and put the seeds in the water. The seeds that sink to the bottom are the best. By selecting a good seed it reduces the energy required for managing pest control." Widia says.
Widia estimates that 15 – 20 percent of Bali's farmers now use SRI although many farmers continue to resist the switch, especially those who have much more fertile land and a good water supply. Farmers who are struggling with water scarcity in arid areas are more open to switching. In the Katik Lantang, Singakerta area of Bali, farmers say they drove up rice production from 7.4 tonnes per hectare to 12.2 tonnes with SRI.
"SRI rice is much heavier than other rice because there are fewer empty grains," Widia says. "It's also much healthier because the roots are stronger and go much deeper compared to conventionally farmed rice."
But an even greater motivation for reluctant farmers to make the switch is that SRI-grown rice is much more profitable. A 2007 study showed that the final profit based on one hectare using SRI rose to Rp6.04 million compared to Rp3.7 million profit from conventional farming methods.
That isn't to say Sri doesn't have its skeptics. One of them is Thomas Sinclair, a plant physiologist at the Agriculture Research Service in the US Department of Agriculture, who writes that SRI "runs directly counter to well-established principles for high crop growth. These principles were developed over many years of careful testing and scrutiny by scientists worldwide, and they have stood the test of time."
SRI's low plant densities, Sinclair wrote, are a problem because energy for crop growth results from intercepted sunlight, and the amount of light intercepted translates directly into plant growth. High plant density enhances light interception, growth and yield. SRI suffers from poor light interception because of low plant densities. Ample water, he writes, maximizes rice yields, and flooded paddy fields assure that no water limitations develop. Third, he says, SRI faces a serious challenge in obtaining sufficient mineral nutrients from organic sources to achieve high yields and without sufficient nitrogen, those yields are not possible.
Other studies, including one by professors at Cornell, found that "there is still no evidence that SRI out-yields best management practices beyond Madagascar." Achim Dobermann, head of research at the highly respected International Rice Research Institute, has also been quoted as saying the claims for SRI are exaggerated.
Nonetheless, the Indonesian Agency of Agricultural Research and Development (AARD) and its Rice Research Center in Sukamandi, West Java in 2008 reported that dry-season SRI paddy yields were 6.2 tonnes per hectare compared to the control yield of 4.1 tonnes, and that in the subsequent wet season, the SRI plot yielded 8.2 tonnes/ha.
There are some acknowledged pitfalls. Since rice is the same family as grass, SRI crops can be riddled with weeds and difficult to manage. Some farmers complain that it's much harder for them to harvest SRI, because the roots are a great deal more resilient than traditionally farmed rice crops.
"The main pitfall we have positively identified is damage from root-feeding nematodes when farmers switch to aerobic soil conditions. But that depends on the existence of such populations in the soil already. Most nematodes are not root-feeding but rather are beneficial or neutral. SRI also requires more labor during the learning phase, but becomes labor saving over time," Uphoff said.
In practice, SRI involves some combination of the following changes in rice cultivation practices. These practices are as follows:
- Transplant seedlings at a very young age – 8 to 12 days old, at most 15 days old, instead of the usual age for seedlings of 3-4 weeks or more.
- Raise seedlings in unflooded nurseries, not planted densely and well-supplied with organic matter. There is an option of direct-seeding, but transplanting is most common.
- Transplant seedlings quickly, carefully and shallow – taking care to have minimum trauma to roots, not inverting plant root tips upward which delays resumption of growth.
- Transplant seedlings at wider distance and singly -- rather than in clumps of 3-4 plants -- and in a square pattern, usually 25x25 cm, giving roots and leaves more space to grow.
- Do not continuously flood the soil – soil saturation causes plant roots to regenerate and suppresses soil organisms that require oxygen; either apply small amounts of water daily, to keep soil moist but not saturated, or alternately flood and dry the soil.
- Weed control is preferably done with a simple mechanical hand weeder. This aerates the soil as it eliminates weeds, giving better results than either hand weeding or herbicides.
- Provide as much organic matter as possible to the soil – while chemical fertilizer gives positive results with SRI practices, the best yields will come with organic fertilization. This does more than feed the plant: it feeds the soil, so that the soil can feed the plant.
Michelle Cempaka is a Bali-based journalist.
No comments:
Post a Comment