Soon it’s time to start some sorghum and rice seedling. We tried rice a couple years ago, by the rice seeds didn’t germinate. Last year I was too busy, but hopefully I’ll get to try some rice again.
Especially since US produced rice has so much arsonic and our dogs eat rice every day, it would be great to grow some rice.
How Millions of Farmers are Advancing Agriculture For Themselves
… 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 Sumant Kumar who has a farm of just two hectares in Darveshpura village in the state of Bihar in Northern India. His record yield of 22.4 tons per hectare, from a one-acre plot, 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. ….
This is some badly needed excellent news. We need to get away from the factory farms and it’s fantastic to read about this success. FYI, it doesn’t just apply to rice:
… 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 (rapeseed/canola)(another SMI), teff (STI), legumes such as pigeon peas, lentils and soya beans, and vegetables such as tomatoes, chillies and eggplant.
That similar results are seen across such a range of plants suggests some generic processes may be involved, and these practices are not only good for growing rice. This suggests to Prof. Norman Uphoff and colleagues within the SRI network that more attention should be given to the contributions that are made to agricultural production by the soil biota, both in the plants’ rhizospheres but also as symbiotic endophytes within the plants themselves (Uphoff et al. 2012). …
Great article!
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