The One-Straw Revolution - Multiworld India

Invariably our peasant visitors were puzzled about our opposition toploughing. I would dig up some soil and show them how many moreinsects and worms we had. Farmers had no difficulty understanding thatthose were our ploughmen. I used to ask them, with so many millions oftireless ploughmen in the soil, where was the need for us to plough?Some observant visitors used to point to weeds, cobwebs, frogs, algae,and other signs of untidiness in our fields. I used to tell them that if theycompared their own crop with ours they would find our input costs lowerand yields much higher. The choice was theirs. This muted most of them.A geneticist friend, Dr. R.H. Richharia, explained the mystery of oursuccess with rice. He pointed out that since central India is the home ofthe rice plant, it is comfortable here and adapts easily to any change ingrowing conditions. He told us that there were probably 40,000 Varietiesof rice in a 200 mile wide belt from Surat to Cuttack. Of these, 20,000were collected and catalogued in a government seed bank with which hewas associated all his life. The high yielding varieties we were growinghappened not to be too badly damaged by engineering. They still had thegenetic potential to develop a suitable root structure to feed on organicmatter. That is why our rice stopped asking for fertilizer on finding thefoolish newcomer to the community obstinate.In the course of our experiments at Rasulia we learned many otherinteresting things. A couple of examples will give the reader a hint of thekinds of things nature revealed to us.All over the world, among civilized people, 'weeds' are regarded asenemies. Enormous amounts of energy are spent to eliminate them.Weeding is regarded as the most tedious task in agriculture and alsoperhaps the most beneficial. People want to seexviii