The One-Straw Revolution - Multiworld India

With insect damage the situation is the same. The most importantthing is not to kill the natural predators. Keeping the field 'continuouslyunder water or irrigating with stagnant or polluted water will also lead toinsect problems. The most troublesome insect pests, summer and fallleaf-hoppers, can be kept under control by keeping water out of the field.Green rice leaf-hoppers, living in the weeds over the winter, maybecome a virus host. If this happens the result is often a loss of ten totwenty percent from rice blast disease. If chemicals are not sprayed,however, there will be many spiders present in the field and one cangenerally leave the work to them. Spiders are sensitive to even theslightest human tampering and care must always be taken on thisaccount.Most people think that if chemical fertilizer and insecticides wereabandoned agricultural yields would fall to a fraction of the present level.Experts on insect damage estimate that losses in the first year after givingup insecticides would be about five percent. Loss of another five percentin abandoning chemical fertilizer would probably not be far mistaken.That is, if the use of water in the rice field were curtailed, and thechemical fertilizer and pesticide spraying encouraged by the AgriculturalCo-op were abandoned, the average losses in the first year wouldprobably reach about ten percent. The recuperative power of nature isgreat beyond imagining and after this initial loss, I believe harvestswould increase and eventually surpass their original level.While I was with the Kochi Testing Station, I carried outexperiments in the prevention of stem borers. These insects enter andfeed on the stem of the rice plant, causing the stalk to turn white andwither. The method of estimating the damage is simple: you count howmany white stalks or rice there are. In a71