Vishnu Kumar Ojha, of Misraulia Village, eastern Uttar Pradesh, outlines plans to intercrop maize and rice on raised soil beds. His rice yields using zero-tillage on permanent beds have been as high as five tons per hectare and his wheat yields as high as six tons. |
Innovation in the
Eastern Indo-Gangetic
Plains: Calling at the
Door of the Poor
The success of zero-tillage in northern India has opened the way for other resource-conserving innovations, such as permanent beds for rice, wheat, and diverse other crops. Among the most active innovators are small-scale farmers in eastern Uttar Pradesh, many of whom missed out on the prosperity the Green Revolution brought to peers further west.
His neighbors laughed when Vishnu Kumar Ojha, of Misraulia Village, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, began trying the new practices. “They said I’d destroy my crop,” he explains. Ojha has been using zero-tillage and production on raised soil beds since 2001. Now he has acquired so much knowledge and confidence that neighbors and more distant farmers hire him for advice. With money saved from the new practices, from growing cash crops, and from consulting, he has purchased several household appliances and is sending his children to a better school. Noteworthy is that Ojha accomplished all of this by working less than two hectares of noncontiguous land (four plots at different locations), and without owning a tractor (he pays a neighbor for work that requires one).
“For a small farmer, zero-tillage has immediate advantages,” Ojha explains, “but those who seek longterm stability should go for bed planting. It saves water and allows diversification.” Hard work, intelligence, and risk-taking have brought Ojha good fortune, but he also credits support from the multidisciplinary research team of U.P. Singh, a principal investigator at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India, and member of the Rice-Wheat Consortium (RWC) for the Indo-Gangetic Plains (see box). “Many organizations work in agriculture,” says Ojha, “but only the RWC team has been active and responsive to the concerns of farmers.”
Sowing Innovation
from Village to Village
“I began as a rice agronomist,” says Singh, “but working in the Consortium, my mind was opened to the entire rice-wheat cropping system.” Singh heads a multidisciplinary team at the University that offers local farmers—mainly smallholders—a range of more productive, resource-conserving options. They also help farmers to choose and test the most relevant, then provide backstopping to solve problems or follow up on ideas that farmers propose. Zero-tillage for sowing wheat after rice is their calling card. “Between Varanasi and Ballia, we are establishing sites every 30 kilometers,” he says. “Farmers are always wary and unbelieving at first, and ask ‘Without tilling, how can a crop grow?’ “ Once the innovations catch on in a village, the researchers go to another location and repeat the process. In addition to promoting improved agronomic practices, Singh hands out seed of new crop varieties on credit. “I loan farmers a bag on the condition they pay me back with two,” he says. “I then pass the extra seed to more farmers—a cost-effective way to reach many who would otherwise have little access to improved varieties.”
Out with the Old Seed
Another BHU colleague, Arun K. Joshi, and his team have
also had success spreading new practices and helping small-scale farmers
to test and adopt new and better wheat varieties. “Nearly four million
hectares in the northeastern plains of India were sown to HUW234 in 1999,”
says Joshi. “The lack of diversity opens the crop to the threat
of new, virulent pathogen strains.” Joshi credits CIMMYT wheat breeder
Guillermo Ortiz-Ferrara with the idea of farmer varietal testing. “We
give the interested farmers 15-20 kilograms of seed of their favorite
selections, and through farmer-to-farmer exchanges the seed quickly reaches
others in the village.” Joshi and his team have been promoting zerotillage
since 1997, when zero-tillage planters were given to his institution by
the Directorate of Wheat Research of the Indian Council of Agricultural
Research, Karnal. Their success has encouraged others to promote resource-conserving
practices in eastern Uttar Pradesh. According to Joshi, “Zero-tillage
has spread to
45,000 hectares in 12 districts.”
|
The Rice Wheat Consortium for the Indo-Gangetic Plains (RWC) is a successful partnership between the national agricultural research systems of Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan; CIMMYT, IRRI, ICRISAT, CIP, IWMI, and AVRDC; and several advanced research institutes. The Consortium was established in 1994 as an Ecoregional Initiative of the CGIAR. In 1998, CIMMYT was assigned convening and leadership responsibilities.
Through RWC efforts, farmers in South Asia have begun using practices that save water, fuel, and other inputs, facilitate timely planting, reduce tillage needs and crop residues burning and allow them to diversify their cropping systems. The most prominent of these practices—zero tillage to sow wheat after rice—was used on nearly 1.3 million hectares during the 2003-04 wheat season, up from practically nothing just a few years ago. Farmers are now in possession of more than 20,000 zero-tillage planters (up from only 1,600 in 2000) made by 120 small-scale private entrepreneurs (compared to 42 in 2000), boosting off-farm industry and employment in the region. Adoption of zero-tillage could exceed several million hectares in a few years, as local manufacturers continue to meet the demand for machinery, farmers share insights, and knowledge of the benefits spreads. Net benefits in India and Pakistan through higher yields and lower land preparation costs amounted to more than USD 100 million in winter 2003 alone. Use of zero-tillage for wheat saves more than 50 liters of diesel per hectare, representing a savings of 75 million liters, worth more than USD 40 million regionwide. Consortium studies on water balances at the farm and watercourse levels show that zero-tillage and sowing on raised soil beds can save 10-18% in irrigation water. Rice-wheat rotations are grown on 13.5 million hectares and provide food and livelihoods for several hundred million people. Rice-RWC Support Over the years a consortium of generous partners has supported the RWC, including the following:
National research systems of the participating countries have also provided funding and significant in-kind support for RWC activities, and international centers like CIMMYT and IRRI have drawn on their own unrestricted funds to ensure that work goes forward. |
For more information: r.gupta@cgiar.org
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January, 2005