Water Users Association and Irrigation Management - Institute for ...

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lands are generally far from the irrigated lands. Rice is the staple food of the migrant
Andhra farmers whereas Kannada farmers use jowar and bajra apart from rice.
Method of paddy cultivation
Farmers follow traditional method of paddy cultivation, where fields are flooded
throughout the crop growth period. The basic feature of this traditional irrigation method is
that a shallow water layer is kept on the soil surface of the paddy fields throughout 70-80
percent of the entire growing season. Hence a tremendous amount of water is used for the
paddy fields under the traditional irrigation method. Most of the farmers have not adopted
the water saving alternate wetting and drying method due to their ignorance of such
methods of cultivation while some knowledgeable farmers have not adopted this method
because it requires more supervision and labor than the traditional shallow-flooding system.
Moreover farmers are not confident of the output of the alternative wetting and drying
method. Adoption may also be hampered by farmers' concerns about not having access to
water when they need it. Agriculture in the study area is dominated by large scale farming
rather than subsistence farming and large and medium farmers here sell more than 70
percent of their harvest. The abundant water environment in which paddy grows will
differentiate it from all other important crops. The main features of paddy cultivation are as
follows.
• Land preparation: (land leveling, ploughing, weeding, cleaning bunds, etc.)
• Seed preparation: (prepare seed for transplanting)
• Nursery: (sowing seeds evenly on seed bed)
• Transplanting: (25-day-old seed is transplanted. Planting distance is 25 x 25 em)
• Weeding: (removal of unwanted plants that is done either by hand or hoe)
• Fertilizing: (application of organic and inorganic fertilizers)
• Application of pesticides
• Harvesting: (done manually and also by harvester)
• Threshing: (done mainly in local mills)
• Storing: (for commercial purpose and home consumption)
• Marketing: (mainly sold in Gangavathi).
This combination of the above cultural practices apparently has being adopted for decades
in the study villages. Farmers rely on both family labor and hired labor. Young people
coming in from the nearby camps are contracted to work for a task, a day, or a season.
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