Environmentally sensitive agriculture is often viewed as a luxury even by wealthy farmers and nations, but in eastern India, some of the world’s poorest farm households regard it as an absolute necessity. The roads are more potholes than macadam. The dusty shanty shops lining the roads are thinly stocked with necessities: matches, laundry soap, cigarettes (sold singly). In nearby fields, people toil barefoot, without even a pair of plastic sandals. One can physically feel the poverty that stifles India’s state of Bihar, and unfortunately that feeling is supported by official statistics. In April 2003, India’s president expressed his anguish at the results of a study from the Rajeev Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies and the Confederation of Indian Industry, which ranked Indian states from “A” to “E” in their economic progress and development. Bihar was the only state in all of India to “earn” an “E” rating. “Bihar is where CIMMYT needs to be” “Bihar is exactly where we want to be, where CIMMYT needs to be,” says Raj Gupta, CIMMYT researcher and regional facilitator of the Rice-Wheat Consortium (RWC) of the Indo-Gangetic Plains. Gupta and the RWC promote resource-conserving technologies (RCTs) and crop diversification in rice-wheat areas of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. The RCTs, as the name implies, are technology packages (tillage, crop management, and other agronomic practices) that conserve soil and water and reduce fuel and labor requirements (detailed in CIMMYT’s last two Annual Reports).

“There is a misconception that RCTs such as zero tillage and bed planting only benefit large-scale farmers in high production areas such as the Punjab,” says Gupta. “This is far from the truth. If you want to see impact on people’s livelihoods, come to Bihar, come to eastern Uttar Pradesh.”

Diversification with
conservation

At a five-acre farm in the village of Pilkhi, Bihar, a slightly built man with an entourage of old and young family members approaches and identifies himself as Mr. Mehato. Gupta explains that this small farm exemplifies the goals and general approaches of the RWC: providing farmers with management options employing RCTs, taking a farmer participatory approach to research, diversifying the cropping system, and assembling a committed project team.

Mehato and agronomist Mruthyunjaya Kumar of Rajendra Agricultural University view a plot in which maize and boro (winter) rice are planted on beds. Mehato was encouraged that the rice was doing fairly well in the scheme suggested by Kumar, and was more than pleased that the maize, Shaktiman, a CIMMYT-derived quality protein maize (QPM) hybrid, did well during the coldest winter in 50 years, when his neighbors’ maize failed.

Following these winter crops, monsoon rice will be planted, then potatoes on beds and maize in the furrows. After the potatoes are harvested, the soil is mounded around the maize and boro rice is planted again. “The analysis is still underway,” says Gupta, “and this may not be the most efficient rotation, but we are moving toward diversifying the cropping system, and we are doing it hand-in-hand with farmers.”

Uttar Pradesh: Even
sharecroppers benefit

Mehato’s holdings may seem modest to outsiders, but they are grand compared to those of Keshoram, who farms one acre (less than half of a hectare), and of sharecroppers Rameshwar Singh and his wife Parameshwari Devi, all from eastern Uttar Pradesh.

Keshoram has planted zero-till rice and wheat for the past year. He had to take the risk of planting the rice directly rather than transplanting it. His neighbors mocked him. Even the RWC team was concerned because of shortcomings with the zero-till planter and the uneven nature of the field. Weeds—a big challenge of zero tillage for poor farmers, who have little money for herbicides—were handled by Keshoram the oldfashioned way. He weeded his field manually. In the end, his persistence paid dividends in the form of abundant rice and wheat yields.

Zero tillage allows farmers to plant wheat earlier than usual because they can avoid the multiple stages of land preparation entailed by conventional tillage. With wheat, each day of delay in planting past the optimal time results in a 1–1.5% loss in yield. “On Keshoram’s acre that would work out to one ton lost over the season,” says Gupta, “given that planting delays of 20 to 30 days are common under conventional tillage.”

Sharecropper Rameshwar Singh and his wife adopted zero tillage to gain that early planting advantage. Singh maintains that he harvested at least 800 kilograms more wheat from his single acre. While Gupta notes that this is not a scientific finding, he adds that Singh also saved on costs because less custom land preparation had to be done—only a single tractor pass with zero tillage, as opposed to 3–6 passes for wheat and 3–8 passes for rice under conventional tillage.

When farmers crop such small areas, it is not the size of the farm that counts, but the number of farmers who use resource-conserving technologies. Local researchers estimate that in Bihar about 1,700 farmers now use the technology; in Eastern Uttar Pradesh, about 2,800.

A service industry for
small-scale farmers

Some might think that fewer tractor passes would be an ominous trend for custom equipment operators, disposing them to oppose zero tillage and bed planting. This may be the case for some operators, but clearly not all. Manoj Kumar runs the custom agricultural service that worked Singh’s acre, and he was the first in his area to purchase a zero-tillage seed drill after experimenting with a drill loaned to him by the RWC. He says it is true that he makes less money per farmer, but he provides service to many more farmers, and he can do their work faster.

Kumar also farms. This past year he grew rice on raised beds, which reduced fuel costs and water use. He believes that as local farmers see the bed technology for themselves, they may bypass zero tillage and go directly to bed planting.

This would not surprise Gupta, who takes obvious pleasure in working directly with farmers as they experiment, sometimes successfully, sometimes less so, with the diverse components of zero tillage and raised bed planting. There are few places where he would rather see the economic and environmental benefits of his work than in this long-suffering region of India.

	For more information:
	r.gupta@cgiar.org www.rwc-prism.cgiar.org

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February, 2004