We have a global problem with food production, scientists of
the World Resources Institute, WRI, are saying (05 December 2018, wri.org).
In their 2797-word report ("How To Sustainably Feed 10 Billion People By
2050, In 21 Charts"), Janet Ranganathan et al recommend, among other
things, improving (a) crop breeding and (b) soil & water management; we
need for (a) to produce more genetically modified organisms, GMOs, for new crops;
for (b) to practice agroforestry, rainwater harvesting, and rebuild soil
health.
I'm saying, GMOs etc are their choices, not mine. A typical
and atypical Ilocano, my choice for rice production is the System of Rice Intensification, SRI, a complete planting method originated
by Fr Henri de Laulanie in Madagascar and globally propagated by Cornell
University SRI-Rice (sri.ciifad.cornell.edu).
SRI must become The Rice Farmers' Love,
because it yields them a hundredfold. Literally!
In the above photo, Joby Arandela, Chair of the Zarraga
Integrated Diversified Organic Farmers Association, ZIDOFA, in Zarraga, Iloilo,
holds plentiful tillers growing from a single transplanted hill of rice. This
is from the field (behind him) planted previously via Organic SRI.
I'm a BS Agriculture graduate from the premiere institution
in this field, UP College of Agriculture (now UP Los Baños), and I know
professors here don't talk much about rice tillers. How important are rice
tillers? For answers, we go out of the Philippines! ANN says (Government of
Western Australia, agric.wa.gov.au/):
The ability of a
cereal crop to tiller is an indication of the crop’s ability to maximize crop
yield. An inadequate number of tillers will limit the number of heads and yield
potential.
Rice is a cereal; tillers are shoots from the same plant.
What ANN is saying is that, all things being equal, the more tillers a single
rice plant has, the higher the yield. Look at the above image again; ANN tells
us that the number of tillers can be as high as 40 per plant! (Author Not
Named, agritrop.cirad.fr).
How does a tiller produce the grains? A rice tiller
"grows independently of the mother stem (culm) by means of its own
adventitious roots" (Xueyong Li et al, Nature,
ncgr.ac.cn).
With their own roots, the more tillers,
the more grains – don't farmers love that!
In other words, the secret of intensification or
multiplication of rice, lies in increasing the number of tillers per hill. A new
lesson for me, an old agriculturist.
That sets me to thinking of proposing a new national rice
program where farmers apply SRI. The program I will call Farmers LOVE, where LOVE is acronym for Locally adopted varieties, Organic farming options, Village orientation,
and Entrepreneurship.
For Farmers LOVE, we will need public-private partnerships
of banks, cooperatives, working-model farm families in Luzon, Visayas & Mindanao.
Budget? Minimum of P3B. We already have
the working model of plentiful growing of rice – the Organic SRI scheme as
practiced by ZIDOFA. And we will need to train our farmers in sustainable entrepreneurship
not unlike ZIDOFA farmers, for which they apply a closed loop value chain.
Farmers LOVE is the answer!517
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