RAIPUR JATTAN, India / SINGAPORE (Reuters) – For more than two decades, Indian farmer Ravindra Kajal cultivated rice in the same way as his ancestors: every June he flooded his fields with water before hiring an army of farmers to plant seedlings for rice.
FILE PHOTO: Workers work in a rice field in the town of Gunowal on the outskirts of the city of Amritsar, in northern India, in the state of Punjab, on June 16, 2014. REUTERS / Munish Sharma / File photo
But the shortage of workers this year due to the coronavirus forced Kajal to change. I irrigate the field enough to moisten the soil and leased a drilling machine to sow seeds directly on his 9-acre (3.6 hectare) plot.
“As I was more than comfortable with the proven way of growing rice, I opted for the new method with some trepidation,” said Kajal, 46, looking over his field, green with rice sprouts, in the village of Raipur Jattan. . in the state of Haryana.
“But I have already saved about 7,500 rupees ($ 100) an acre because I barely spent on water and workers this year,” he said.
India is the world’s largest rice exporter and the world’s second largest producer after China. In the country’s grain basin states, Haryana and neighboring Punjab, the coronavirus has forced thousands of farmers like Kajal to mechanize planting.
They still distrust technology and negate the traditional use of manual labor.
But Kahan Singh Pannu, Punjab’s agriculture secretary, is convinced that a historic change is taking place that could dramatically increase India’s rice production, which in turn could affect world markets.
“It is nothing less than a revolution in Indian agriculture,” he told Reuters.
Government officials say the so-called rice direct sowing (DSR) method could increase yields by about a third and reduce costs for workers and water.
DSR machines allow farmers to grow more than 30 young trees per square meter against the usual 15 to 18 seedlings, said Naresh Gulati, a state government farm official in Punjab.
(Chart: signs of “revolution” in India’s rice bowl as farmers embrace mechanized seeding: here)
Punjab is home to the Green Revolution of the 1960s that caused an increase in crop yield. This year, farmers used seed drilling machines to sow rice on more than half a million hectares, a huge increase compared to less than 50,000 hectares in 2019, producers and government officials said.
Pannu expects DSR usage to increase again next year.
“More and more farmers are using DSR technology, which seems to be so promising that the 2.7 million hectares of Punjab rice area could enter it next year, which will be a milestone for Indian rice production” , said.
Avinash Kishore, a researcher at the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), said that if this year’s harvest were good, DSR would be the way to go.
“The scale of this year’s change to DSR is a momentous change in rice cultivation in India,” he said.
Sudhanshu Singh, an agronomist at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, said the move to DSR was “one of the rare positive side effects of COVID.”
NO MIGRANT JOB
None of the world’s major rice exporting nations, India, Vietnam, and Thailand, makes significant use of planting machines.
They have come into play in a big way in India this year because hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from Bihar and Jharkhand states in the east did not make it to the northern grain belt for the 2020 planting season due to the coronavirus blockade.
That pushed up the price of local workers and made it cheaper for farmers to rent rice planting machines rather than pay for the contracted aid, said Jaskaran Singh Mahal, director of the Punjab Agricultural University.
Agricultural wages have risen from 1,500 rupees per acre to approximately 4,500 rupees this year, and producers need about half a dozen workers to transplant rice into a one-acre parcel.
In comparison, farmers can hire planting machines for Rs 5,000 to Rs 6,000 per acre, which can cover 25 to 30 acres in one day, rice farmers said.
“In addition to helping us save on major overhead costs like water and labor, DSR is fast, unlike the old method that was tedious and time consuming,” said Devinder Singh Gill, a farmer in the Moga district of Punjab, known for its aromatic basmati. rice.
The conventional method requires farmers to plant seeds in nurseries and then wait 20 to 30 days before manually transplanting the seedlings into the ankle-deep plantation fields in water.
Planting machines allow farmers to avoid the nursery stage and plant directly in the fields.
Water conservation is another key attribute of DSR, which is crucial in a mostly dry, monsoon-dependent country like India.
According to the conventional method, 3,000 to 5,000 liters of water are used in India to produce 1 kg of rice, the crop with the greatest thirst for water, and the DSR allows producers to reduce water consumption by at least 50% at 60%, farmers and government officials said.
The main challenge for farmers using direct sowing machines is weed management, which requires the application of herbicides during the season.
Still, even considering the additional costs of these applications, the total cost of cultivation is substantially lower under DSR, said Kajal, the farmer in Haryana.
Another drawback will be that if the method is adopted across the agricultural belt, there will be huge unemployment in the eastern states next year.
But farmers say they will wait to see the harvest in October before deciding whether to continue the technology next year.
“The new technology leads to huge savings from water and labor, but the real test lies in productivity and farmers will not be completely convinced unless they see an increase in their yields,” said Ashok Singh, a rice farmer.
Reports by Mayank Bhardwaj and Naveen Thukral; Gavin Maguire and Raju Gopalakrishnan Edition
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