Kathmandu, Nepal
September 15, 2005
Kunda Dixit,
SciDev.Net
Dan Bahadur Rajbansi is planting
rice seedlings on his farm near Nepal's border with India, 300
kilometres southeast of Kathmandu.
The monsoon rains came late to
Nepal this year and many farmers delayed transplanting their
rice seedlings from nursery beds to paddy fields.
But Rajbansi was ready. He is
one of a dozen farmers in Morang district testing a new method
of planting rice. It is reported to boost harvests without
requiring farmers to flood their fields or use chemical
fertilisers and pesticides.
It sounds too good to be true.
After all, this is not a high-yielding variety of genetically
modified rice but the normal local variety, mansuli.
Bumper harvests
The secret lies in the
cultivation method: the seedlings are transplanted when they are
only two weeks old instead of at six weeks. Instead of being
flooded, the field is drained. And the seedlings are planted
farther apart — while a normal paddy field needs 50 kilograms of
seed per hectare, the new method uses less than ten kilograms.
Yet because each seedling
produces many more shoots than when planted conventionally, the
harvest can more than double.
"I thought, how can this be?"
says local agriculture officer Rajendra Uprety, recalling first
reading about the technique on the Internet. He decided to test
it out. "Since 2002, we've achieved double and triple harvests
on test plots. It's just amazing."
Ananta Ram Majhi, another of
Morang district's rice farmers, admits he was sceptical.
"Initially, I thought to myself, if this is such a great idea
why didn't my ancestors think of it?" he says, wading ankle-deep
in mud to prepare his next field. "But I decided to take the
chance and this is my third year using the new method."
Majhi used to harvest five
tonnes per hectare, but is now getting at least twice as much.
He has achieved those yields with only one-third of the seeds he
used before and with less water.
News of the amazing harvests
spread quickly from Morang district, where about 100 farmers
have adopted the new method. Uprety brings farmers from other
districts there on inspection visits. "Actually, it has been
more difficult convincing the agronomists and officials than the
farmers," he laughs.
Sceptical scientists
It hasn't been
easy to convince international scientists either. Agriculture
research institutes have been doubtful ever since Henri de
Laulanie, a French Jesuit priest in Madagascar, devised the new
method in 1983.
It was only after the
International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development at
Cornell University in the United States started pushing the idea
that it was taken seriously.
The System of Rice
Intensification (SRI), as it is now called, has been tried and
tested in about 20 countries, from Cuba to China.
Tens of thousands
of farmers have adopted the method in the few years since
researchers introduce it in Cambodia. There, as in India, Laos,
and Sri Lanka, farmers report that SRI means bigger harvests and
better incomes, for fewer seeds and less water.
But critics say that scientific
evidence for such claims is lacking. Most field trial results
have, for instance, not been recorded in detail and published in
peer-reviewed journals (see
Can 'rice intensification' feed the world?)
When researchers at the
International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and colleagues
tested SRI in field trials in China, they found no difference in
yield between SRI and conventionally-grown rice.
Their study, published in
Field Crops Research in March 2004, concluded that: "SRI has
no major role in improving rice production generally".
Training the trainers
For Uprety though, the results
speak for themselves. He points out that the technique's success
depends on skillful farming, good timing, and careful planting
and drainage. Since planting on flooded paddy fields helped to
control weeds, the drier SRI fields need weeding several times
during the growing season.
But the benefits far outweigh
these obstacles, says Uprety, adding that the main challenge is
training.
He has turned local farmers like
Kishore Luitel, who are now total converts to SRI, into
trainers. A few years ago Rajbansi thought Luitel had gone mad
for adopting the new technique. But earlier this month, Luitel
was in Rajbansi's field teaching him how to plant his seedlings
the new way.
The tiny two-week-old seedlings
look fragile in Luitel's hands as he picks them up one by one
and plants them 20 centimetres apart in the sticky mud — not the
10 centimetres apart in slush needed for normal rice planting.
Luitel points out his own field
where rice now grows in thick tufts with more than 80 shoots
from one seed. "Using the old method, you plant three or four
seedlings in one spot and you only get about ten shoots per
seed," he says.
For Uprety and Luitel, seeing is
believing. They are convinced that no part of Nepal need be
short of food anymore if SRI is promoted nationally. Every year,
Nepal needs to produce more than 90,000 tonnes of rice seeds.
The SRI advocates say the method would save 80,000 tonnes and
harvests nationwide could be doubled.
Uprety sums it up: "Sometimes
the best solutions are the simplest ones." |