THE SYSTEM OF RICE INTENSIFICATION: MEMOIRES OF AN INNOVATION

MYANMAR

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About the time that CEDAC began working with rainfed SRI in Cambodia, a similar NGO in Myanmar, the Metta Development Foundation,[7] began introducing SRI methods in the Kachin and Shan states in the northern region of the country. It used farmer field school (FFS) methods for extension.[8] As in Cambodia, the SRI methods relying just on rainfall were based on transplanting young seedlings at wide spacing, with enhancement of soil organic matter, and with soil-aerating weeding when possible.

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One of the difficult ideas to get accepted was that when the monsoon rains came, farmers should not hoard this water in their fields but should keep only enough water to maintain desirable levels of moisture in the soil to support plant growth. Keeping standing water on rice fields for a long as possible will stunt and suffocate rice root systems. When there is water stress later in the growing season and the soil’s top layers dry out, SRI plants with their roots reaching down deeply into the soil will have enough access to water to sustain their growth.

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Each year from 2002 to 2004, ten FFSs in which farmers were getting SRI training were randomly selected for intensive monitoring. Members of these 30 FFSs (out of the 258 FFSs that were conducted over the three years) were studied. These 612 farmers were followed through the succeeding years to see what was the impact of SRI methods and training over time.[9] The yield on the FFS plots that were managed by the farmers averaged 6.5 tonnes per hectare, compared with 2-tonne yields that farmers obtained using usual methods.

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The average yield of these 612 farmers who used SRI methods on their own fields (although not as rigorously as on the FFS demonstration plots) was also monitored. It was 4.2 tonnes compared to their usual yield of 2 tonnes. This was just a doubling of yield rather than the tripling that could be achieved with more careful and thorough use of the new methods. Still, because their usual yields were quite low, creating chronic food insecurity, this doubling was very beneficial for the participating households.

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To evaluate the economic impacts of SRI use and to avoid distortions that fluctuating market prices and exchange rates could introduce, all of the farmers’ costs of production were denominated in terms of the physical amounts of rice (in kg) that the inputs of labor and purchased inputs represented. The comparisons made were in effect: how much rice was invested to produce how much rice? Rainfed rice production in the Kachin and Shan states using traditional methods was not much more than a break-even operation, which kept farm households at subsistence level. So, the net gains achieved were quite spectacular.

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Farmers’ net production of rice per hectare using their usual methods of rice cultivation was 296 kg on average. On SRI plots, their net production averaged 2,584 kg per hectare, almost 10 times more. Farmers’ costs of production increased somewhat under SRI management, but this doubled their output, with a huge net economic gain. Such huge improvements were particularly appreciated because they benefited some of the poorest households in the country. And they showed that even without irrigation, by making certain changes in cultivation methods, poor households could get much more productivity from their available resources.

 

INDIA

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When visiting India in November 2002, my wife Marguerite and I met with staff of the national NGO known as PRADAN to share with them what we were learning in other countries about SRI opportunities.[10] The only field team leader who happened to be in New Delhi at the time, and thus ablef to meet with us in person, was the head of PRADAN’s program in Purulia district of West Bengal. This was a very poor, drought-prone area with a largely tribal population and very little irrigated area. Dinabandhu explained that he thought the circumstances in Purulia were not very favorable for SRI, but he would see what SRI ideas with appropriate modifications could produce there. (See his mini-memoire.)

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In the first year 2003, only four farmers in Purulia were willing to try out the new SRI methods, but their results were good enough that in the next year, 150 farmers followed suit. This attracted the attention of the International Water Management Institute’s India program, which sent a small team to evaluate that season’s results (Chapter 7).

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Even though one of the two villages selected for the study had experienced severe drought, the average yield improvement for the 100 farmers surveyed, selected randomly, 50 in each villages to evaluate the impact of SRI methods, was 32%. Their average net economic return per hectare from their rice production increased by 67%.[11] Surprisingly, these gains were achieved with an average 8% reduction in the amount of labor expended per hectare. Farmers reported to the team that the labor they saved was being used for other activities that improved their income or quality of life.

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PRADAN’s experience with rainfed SRI was already commented on in Chapter 7. Two things that its staff learned from working with Purulia farmers should be noted here. At first, the staff found it difficult to get farmers to stop a practice that they used to cope with the irregularity of the monsoon rains; when the rains came, farmers ‘stored’ as much water as possible on their fields. This seemed like a wise precaution against subsequent water shortages. But as seen in Chapter 4, keeping standing water on rice paddies causes rice plants’ roots to degrade.

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Purulia farmers had to be persuaded to monitor the growth and health of their rice plants’ roots by inspecting them periodically. Seeing their plants’ roots degenerate under flooded conditions made it clear to them that they should not be impounding water on their fields. Instead, they should even let their plants experience some water shortage (stress) early in their growth cycle to induce the roots to grow larger and deeper. This was important learning for rainfed rice farmers. Keeping their rice fields flooded during the first part of the growing season made it more difficult to sustain their rice crop toward the end of the season.

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Second, because the onset of the monsoon rains was unpredictable, varying over a range of about six weeks, it was hard to know exactly when to plant SRI nurseries in order to have young seedlings between 8 and 15 days old available for transplanting from farmers’ nurseries into their fields when the rains came. And climate change was making the monsoon onset more and more erratic. If farmers transplanted seedlings that were more than 15 days old because the rains arrived late, this could cause farmers to lose out on a tonne or more of attainable yield, the amount depending on the size of their rice farm and the age of seedlings.

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Farmers figured out how to work around this problem by each planting several nurseries in succession, rather than just one, starting each nursery a week or 10 days after the other. This stratagem gave them for an extended period of time when young seedlings between 8 and 15 days old would be ready for transplanting when the monsoon came. By planting a series of three or four small nurseries, farmers were able to have ‘young seedlings’ available for a whole month or more.

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Since SRI nurseries require only about 10% as much seed as with conventional practice, planting three or four nurseries would reduce a farmer’s SRI seed-saving by 60-70%, rather than by the 90% that was possible if one nursery was sufficient to provide young seedlings. By using as 10-20 more kg of rice for seed than the minimum needed with SRI, farmers could produce an additional tonne or two of paddy rice per hectare. This was a phenomenal return in benefit-cost terms.

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However, this was not an easy tradeoff to get accepted. For very poor and hungry people, the idea of ‘wasting’ rice was really hard to agree to. When rice grains are food for the family if not used for seed, getting subsistence farmers to deliberately sacrifice rice seed for several extra nurseries was a hard sell. It took several seasons for farmers to accept the idea that forfeiting a few kg of seed could enhance their harvested yield by a hundred times this amount.

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This idea of planting several small nurseries in sequence gradually gained acceptance, even if acceptance was reluctant. This was one of the more important lessons learned for adapting SRI to rainfed cultivation. Good results have meant that rainfed SRI could begin to be used and adapted in other parts of India which is important because about half of India’s rice is grown under rainfed conditions.[12]

 

MALI

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SRI got its start in the Timbuktu region where most rice is grown with irrigation using water diverted from rivers or pumped from groundwater. But there was also farmer experimentation with rainfed SRI in the Sikasso region of southern Mali starting in 2009-10.[13] This initiative was instructive in part because rainfed rice-growing in the region was mostly done by women, in a customary division of labor where they had to give priority to providing labor for their husbands’ farms, which constrained their own agricultural activity. It became quickly evident that introducing and adapting SRI had to take gender issues and differences into account.

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Erika Styger worked with women’s associations in the Sikasso region to evaluate four different variations of rainfed SRI, ranging from upland areas where the soils were very well-drained to lowland areas that ranged from higher to medium to lower.  Soils in the latter category had to contend with the constraint of waterlogging. SRI principles had to be adapted for both soil and water management where there was no water control or where excess water could be a problem.

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Women liked SRI’s idea of planting in rows because this made their weeding easier. But establishing the crop through transplanting of young seedlings was not feasible, because the women had little or no time to raise nurseries and also because the timing and amount of rainfall were unreliable. Planting a succession of nurseries as done in Purulia district of India to address this latter problem was out of the question because of the limitations on labor time.

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So, a direct-seeded version of SRI was introduced, planting several seeds in a hill and then after 10 to 15 days removing all but the best seedling in each hill, similar to what was done in the Philippines. Hills were spaced at 25 × 25 cm, the usual SRI recommendation, instead of the more familiar distance of 10-20 cm.

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Previously, compost was applied only to the men’s fields, but for rainfed SRI here, the women started putting organic matter on their own fields, and saw dramatic improvements in the health and yield of their crops. As there was no abundance of vegetative growth in this semi-arid area that could be applied as compost or mulch, it was concluded that growing a green-manure crop before the season would be a desirable practice.

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The variety of rice that was planted in the upland trials was Nerica-4, developed by WARDA, now the Africa Rice Center. Unfortunately, this variety does not respond very well to SRI management because it does not tiller profusely. In the high to middle to low lowland plots, where the topography channeled water runoff into soil depressions and lower horizons, there were 42-72% increases in yield.

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A local variety that had no particular name responded very well to unirrigated SRI practices, giving yields of 6.6 tonnes per hectare, a yield remarkable even for irrigated rice fields in the region. In the control plots with farmer methods, this variety gave only 3.6 tonnes per hectare.

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In controlled trials, the women farmers found that transplanting gave 20% higher yield for both SRI and farmer methods compared with direct-seeded crop management. However, farmers had to decide for themselves whether the additional labor required for transplanting was worthwhile, or even available. Below is a picture of an SRI farmer in rainfed Sikasso region showing the difference in panicle size that she could see in conventionally-managed vs. SRI rice plants.