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Although there is talk of another Green Revolution, the approaches beingproposed are essentially more of the same. This technological strategy for raising production is running into major economic and environmentalconstraints, however. The costs of fossil fuel-derived inputs keep rising, while impaired soil health and degraded water quality are growing concerns.
Paradigm shift
Agroecological management systems capitalise on the potential for more productive and robust crops from existing plant genomes and on their intricate, symbiotic associations with other organisms, particularly microorganisms — in what is now becoming better understood as the plant-soil microbiome. [1]
A paradigm shift — from regarding non-crop organisms as mostly pests or pathogens and treating plants as carbon-based machines, to understanding networks and webs of symbiotic relationships — can help us ‘rebiologise‘ agriculture and adopt alternative methods that are better suited to current and foreseeable challenges.
More for less
Compared with standard crop management methods, SRI practices raise yields usually by 50–100 per cent and sometimes more. These gains are achieved with less water, greatly reduced seed rates, less or no inorganic fertilisers, and often even with less labour once the methods have been mastered. [2,3,4,5]
Other benefits include greater resistance to drought and water stress, storm damage, and to pests and diseases — pressures on crop production that willcertainly increase with climate change.
Record yields
“Agriculture in the twenty-first century will need to change considerably from the technologies and paradigms that evolved in the preceding century.”
Norman Uphoff, Cornell University
This record yield is less significant, however, than two other statistics. First, the rice area under SRI methods in Bihar has risen from 30 hectares in 2007 to more than 300,000 in 2012, a 10,000-fold increase in five years. Second, even without all of the farmers following SRI recommendations fully, their average SRI yield in 2012 was calculated by government technicians as 8.08tonnes per hectare — three times the usual yield in Bihar.
These figures and differences are so large that SRI can no longer be ignored by sceptics and critics. They come from farmers’ fields and from officialreports, not from experimental stations and partisan sources.
Winning the argument
It is time to put the ‘controversy’ over SRI behind us. And it is time to begin learning more about how these new ideas and methods can help get more from less.
For instance, we have begun to learn how microorganisms that livemutualistically within plant organs and tissues, and even cells, bring benefitssuch as increasing the chlorophyll levels in leaves and protecting against pathogens in roots. [7,8]
Learning from farmers
Farmers have been adapting and improving the methods to which they were introduced, and they have been disseminating their knowledge and experience to other farmers — changing the usual linear ‘from lab to land’model of developing and transmitting innovations.
SRI is one of the few innovations where scientists have had difficulty replicating farmers’ results in their on-station trials — usually the situation is reversed. Farmers may be getting higher yields than the researchers dobecause, more often than not, farmers’ soils have less impairment fromfertiliser and agrochemical applications than on experiment plots.
Changing times need changing practices
Norman Uphoff is professor of government and international agriculture at Cornell University, United States, and senior advisor to the SRI-Rice Centerthere. For 15 years he has been trying to get SRI principles and practices better known, evaluated and taken up where beneficial for farmers, consumers and the environment. You can contact him at ntu1@cornell.edu
This article is part of the Spotlight on Producing food sustainably.
References
[1] Nature doi: 10.1038/501S18a (2013)
[2] SRI International Network and Resources Center (SRI-Rice) website
[3] Sato, S. and Uphoff, N. Raising factor productivity in irrigated rice production: Opportunities with the System of Rice Intensification. CAB Reviews: Perspectives in Agriculture, Veterinary Science, Nutrition and Natural Resources (Commonwealth Agricultural Bureau International, UK2007)
[4] Experimental Agriculture doi: 10.1017/S0014479707005340 (2007)
[5] Agriculture and Food Security doi: 10.1186/2048-7010-1-18 (2012)
[6] Diwakar, M.C. et al. Report on the world record SRI yield in kharif season 2011 in Nalanda district, Bihar state, India (Agriculture Today, New Delhi,July 2012)
[7] Applied and Environmental Microbiology doi: 10.1128/AEM.71.11.7271-7278.2005 (2005)
[8] Proteomics doi: 10.1002/pmic.200900694 (2010)
[9] Farmers from Burundi, Cuba, India, Madagascar, Nepal and Rwanda speak for themselves in videos about their experiences with SRI: Flooded Cellar Productions,
Reblogged this on Società Agricola Bertolini.