Alternative Paths to Food Security - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 205

organizations (NGOs) such as the Aga Khan Foundation, which introduced SRI meth-
ods in the mountains of northeastern Afghanistan, an environment not very favorable
for growing rice (Thomas and Ramzi 2011), or from Africare, working in the Timbuktu
region of Mali on the edge of the Sahara Desert (Styger et al. 2011).
While SRI is often considered as a recipe , it is better understood as a menu of prac-
tices. SRI is more a matter of degree than of kind , and part of SRI methodology is farmer
experimentation and evaluations, with adaptation of general principles to specific local
conditions. There is an “ideal type” of SRI that has been validated in large-scale facto-
rial trials under contrasting soil and climatic conditions (Randriamiharisoa and Uphoff
2002; Uphoff and Randriamiharisoa 2002). However, various combinations and extents
of SRI practice can improve crop production, provided that soil conditions are made
and kept mostly aerobic, or well oxygenated, so that plant roots and aerobic soil organ-
isms can thrive there. Crop performance will be better to the extent that more of the
recommended SRI practices are used together, and the more they are used as recom-
mended; however, not all need to be used, and used perfectly, to get better yields.
The SRI innovation is presented concretely in terms of certain recommendations that
change the methods commonly used for irrigated rice production. These changes usu-
ally, if not always, result in more productive and robust phenotypes:
• Transplant younger seedlings , usually less than fifteen days after the seeds have
been sown in a garden-like nursery, not inundated—rather than using larger, older
seedlings that look more impressive but have less potential for growth (Mishra and
Salokhe 2008, 2010).
• Reduce the plant density in the field by 80 to 90 percent —plants should be spaced
widely and in a square pattern, 25x25 cm (or even wider if the soil is very fertile),
putting only 1 seedling in each hill, or at most 2, instead of planting 3-6 plants
together with the hills set out in rows or randomly spaced.
• Transplant quickly and carefully , to minimize trauma to the roots of young seed-
lings—not pulling them up roughly from crowded nurseries, and not leaving them
exposed to the sun and air for hours before plunging them into flooded soil; seed-
lings treated this way take 7-10 days to recover from what is called “transplant
shock” and begin growing again.
• Keep the soil moist but with no standing water , or alternately flood and drain the
paddy fields—continuous flooding of deprives the soil of oxygen and leads to root
degeneration (Kar et al. 1974).
• Control weeds in a soil-aerating way by passing a mechanical weeder up and down
between the hills in perpendicular directions to churn up the top layer of the soil.
This is preferable to pulling up weeds by hand or using herbicides. Soil-aerating
weeding should start early and be done several times during plants' vegetative
growth. This practice enhances crop yield, as seen in Figure 4 of a report from
Afghanistan (Thomas and Ramzi 2011).
• Enrich the soil's stock of organic matter as much as possible, providing com-
post, manure, or other biomass, rather than rely primarily on chemical fertilizer.