Agriculture for Themselves

How Millions of Farmers Are Advancing Agriculture for Themselves

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SRI hybrid rice field in Yunnan, China. Photo: SRI Rice/Zhu Defeng

The world record yield for paddy rice production is not held by an agricultural research station or by a large-scale farmer from the United States, but by a farmer in the state of Bihar in northern India. Sumant Kumar, who has a farm of just two hectares in Darveshpura village, holds a record yield of 22.4 tons per hectare, from a one-acre plot. This feat was achieved with what is known as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI).To put his achievement in perspective, the average paddy yield worldwide is about 4 tons per hectare. Even with the use of fertilizer, average yields are usually not more than 8 tons.
Sumant Kumar’s success was not a fluke. Four of his neighbours, using SRI methods for the first time, matched or exceeded the previous world record from China — 19 tons per hectare. Moreover, they used only modest amounts of inorganic fertilizer and did not need chemical crop protection.

Origins and principles of SRI

Deriving from empirical work started in the 1960s in Madagascar by a French priest — Fr. Henri de Laulanié, S.J. — the System of Rice Intensification has shown remarkable capacity to raise smallholders’ rice productivity under a wide variety of conditions around the world. From tropical rainforest regions of Indonesia, to mountainous regions in northeastern Afghanistan, to fertile river basins in India and Pakistan and to arid conditions of Timbuktu on the edge of the Sahara Desert in Mali, SRI methods have proved adaptable to a wide range of agroecological settings.
With SRI management, paddy yields are usually increased by 50–100 percent, but sometimes by more, even up to the super-yields of Sumant Kumar. Requirements for seed are greatly reduced (by 80–90 percent), as are those for irrigation water (by 25–50 percent). Little or no inorganic fertilizer is required if sufficient organic matter can be provided to the soil, and there is little (if any) need for agrochemical protection. SRI plants are also generally healthier and better able to resist such stresses as well as drought, extremes of temperature, flooding, and storm damage.
SRI methodology is based on four main principles that interact in synergistic ways:

• Establish healthy plants early and carefully, nurturing their root potential;
• Reduce plant populations, giving each plant more room to grow above and below ground;
• Enrich the soil with organic matter, keeping it well-aerated to support better growth of roots and more aerobic soil biota; and
• Apply water purposefully in ways that favor plant-root and soil-microbial growth, avoiding the commonly flooded (anaerobic) soil conditions

These principles are translated into a number of irrigated rice cultivation practices that are typically the following:

• Plant young seedlings carefully and singly, givingthem wider spacing, usually in a square pattern, so that both roots and canopy have ample room to spread;
• Provide sufficient water for plant roots and beneficial soil organisms to grow, but not so much as to suffocate or suppress either. This is done through alternate wetting and drying, or through small but regular water applications;
• Add as much compost, mulch or other organic matter to the soil as possible, ‘feeding the soil’ to ‘feed the plant’; and
• Control weeds with mechanical methods that can incorporate weeds into the soil while breaking up the soil’s surface. This actively aerates the root zone

The cumulative result of these practices is to induce the growth of more productive and healthier plants (phenotypes) from any genetic variety (genotype).

SRI methods frequently result in dramatically improved plant and root growth (SRI rice, left — conventional rice, right). Photo: Amrik Singh.

Using SRI methods, smallholding farmers in many countries are starting to get higher yields and greater productivity from their land, labour, seeds, water and capital, with their crops showing more resilience to the hazards of climate change. These productivity gains have been achieved simply by changing the ways that farmers manage their plants, soil, water and nutrients.
These altered management practices have induced more productive, resilient phenotypes from existing rice plant genotypes in over 50 countries. The reasons for this improvement are not all known, but there is growing literature that helps account for the improvements observed in yield and health for rice crops using SRI.
The ideas and practices that constitute SRI are now being adapted to improve the productivity of a wide variety of other crops. Producing more output with fewer external inputs may sound improbable, but it derives from a shift in emphasis from improving plant genetic potential via plant breeding, to providing optimal environments for crop growth.
The adaptation of SRI experience and principles to other crops is being referred to generically as the System of Crop Intensification (SCI), encompassing variants for wheat (SWI), maize (SMI), finger millet (SFMI), sugarcane (SSI), mustard (another SMI), tef (STI), legumes such as pigeon peas, lentils and soya beans, and vegetables such as tomatoes, chillies and eggplant.
The evidence reported below has drawn heavily, with permission, from a report prepared by Dr. Norman Uphoff on the extension of SRI to other crops (Uphoff 2012), which accompanied his presentation on ‘The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) and Beyond: Coping with Climate Change,’ at the World Bank, Washington, DC, on 10 October 2012.
Much more research and evaluation needs to be done on this progression to satisfy both scientists and practitioners. But this report gives an idea of what kinds of advances in agricultural knowledge and practice are emerging. It is not a research report. The comparisons reported are not experiment station data but rather results that have come from farmers’ fields in Asia and Africa. The measurements of yields reported here probably have some margin of error. But the differences seen are so large and are so often repeated that they are certainly significant agronomically.