SRI in Orissa - Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture ...

CHAPTER 5
Sabarmatee, Sambhav 18
System of Rice Intensification: Enabling a
Joyful Interaction with Nature
Settled cultivation has a history of hardly ten thousand
years. It is still evolving. Is it not important that we still
have to learn a lot from nature to discover her potentials
to our benefits? Once upon a time modern agriculture
was thought to be the ultimate answer to our problems of
production and hunger. Today people have started realising
the limitations of modern agriculture. Though scattered,
the search for alternatives is continuing. The result of one
such effort is SRI.
Sambhav is a grassroots level non-government organisation
born on 8 th March 1989 dedicated to the twin causes of
sustainable development (mainly environmental issues)
and gender issues. Located on the border of Nayagarh
and Ganjam districts of Orissa, it is a rain shadow area
experiencing extreme temperatures, strong winds,
hailstones and long dry periods. Out of 90 acres, we carved
out 1.5 acres of paddy land from a deep gully created out
of soil erosion. Soil depth is 1 to 1.5 inches and one finds
calcinated stones with alkaline soil. In these soils paddy is
not supposed to do well normally, let alone SRI. Still we
are trying our best to continue our experiments so that we
learn from nature. None of our team members is educated
in the science of agriculture, nor were we doing agriculture
before joining Sambhav. What we present here is based on
the observations and experiences of a ‘lay practitioner’.
I need not explain about basics of SRI here. It is a method
of cultivation, and does not advocate a specific variety.
Realisation of higher yields with lesser external inputs
is evident in SRI. This restores faith in organic farming.
From the beginning we have been giving importance to
the use of less external inputs in farming as a principle of
18
I dedicate this paper to Dr. Richaria who lived and died for rice and
Fr. Laulanie who pioneered SRI, to my team members and labourers
without whom SRI could not be done at Sambhav, to Shri Narayan Reddy,
Prof. Radhamohan, Dr. Shambu Prasad who inspired us to practice SRI, and
Shri Nagaratnam Naidu who demonstrated SRI to us and to all other NGOs,
farmers who helped us to learn more by learning from us and practicing SRI
and to all others who are dedicatedly working on SRI.
organic farming. So SRI suits us very much psychologically
and philosophically. The greatest thing about SRI is that
it encourages a culture of innovation, understanding and
observation, but does not prescribe uniform rigid practices.
It empowers us to think differently. We would like to present
our experiences from the points of a practitioner and of a
trainer. We practice ‘Eco-SRI’ by which we mean that all
practices are completely organic in SRI.
Paddy in Summer and Our Land
We heard about SRI and were keen to take it up in October
2005 but we missed the cropping season. We had a CD
on SRI practices of the irrigation department of Andhra
Pradesh (Water and Land Management Training and
Research Institute, WALAMTARI) and Prof Radhamohan had
earlier visited the organic farmer Narayan Reddy’s farm in
Karnataka where SRI was being practiced. We decided to
have a training programme on SRI to know more. We never
cultivated paddy during summer (March to July) ever. Just
because Mr. Nagaratnam Naidu from Andhra Pradesh had
to conduct a practical for the CWS training programme that
was to be held on our campus, we prepared seedlings for
that. After preparing the seedlings a lot of seedlings were
left over. We did not feel like wasting them. However we
knew that it would be difficult for us to keep them from
rotting since we normally do not have surplus water for
irrigation during the summer and we could not apply any
manure to the field. Curiosity and hope on some more yields
encouraged us to take up the risk. RNDA and Lalata varieties
were used, seeds whose qualities were unknown to us.
For more than a month, the crop did not show much
improvement. We thought that since we were doing it at
a wrong time the performance is not up to the mark. In
May we stopped watering. After 15 days of dry period, we
watered the field again out of compassion for the plants.
It was then that we realised that SRI paddy can withstand
water stress up to such great extent! Tillering started and
System of Rice Intensification: Enabling a Joyful Interaction with Nature 37