RAIPUR JATTAN, India / SINGAPORE (Reuters) – For more than two decades, Indian farmer Ravindra Kajal cultivated rice like his ancestors, each June flooding his water fields before hiring an army of farmers to plant rice plants.
But the shortage of staff this year due to the coronavirus has forced Kajal to change. Water the box enough to moisten the soil and rent a drilling device to sow the seeds on its 9-acre (3.6-hectare) plot.
“Because I’m more than comfortable with the proven approach of developing rice, I opted for the new approach with some apprehension,” said Kajal, 46, hunting over his field, green with young rice plants, in the village of Raipur Jattan in Haryana state.
“But I’ve already stored about 7,500 rupees ($100) per acre because I spent a little on water and staff this year,” he said.
India is the world’s largest exporter of rice and the world’s largest manufacturer after China. In the cereal states of Haryana and neighboring Punjab, thousands of farmers like Kajal have been forced through the coronavirus to machine the plantation.
They are still generation and are giving up the centennial use of manual labor.
But Kahan Singh Pannu, Punjab’s secretary of agriculture, is convinced that a historic replacement is underway that can increase India’s rice production, which in turn can have an effect on world markets.
“This is just a revolution in Indian agriculture,” reuters told reuters.
Government officials say the so-called direct seeding of rice (DSR) method could increase yields by about one-third and slash costs on workers and water.
Farmer-compatible DSR machines allow more than 30 seedlings to be grown in the same 15 to 18 old plants, said Naresh Gulati, agricultural official of the Punjab state government.
(Graphic: signs of “revolution” in the Indian rice bowl when farmers machined the planting: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/ce/bdwvkerjevm/IndiaRiceAreaYieldsJul2020.png)
Punjab is the cradle of the green revolution of the 1960s that led to an increase in crop yields. This year, farmers have used planters to sow rice on more than a million hectares, a dramatic increase from less than 50,000 hectares in 2019, manufacturers and government officials said.
Pannu expects DSR use to jump next year.
“More and more farmers are employing DSR technology, which is so promising that all 2.7 million hectares in the Punjab rice box may be next year, which will be a turning point for rice production in India,” he said.
Avinash Kishore, a researcher at the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), said that if this year’s harvest is good, the RSD would be the way forward.
“The scale of this year’s switch to DSR is a major replacement in rice cultivation in India,” he said.
Sudhanshu Singh, an agronomist at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, said the switch to DSR “is one of the few positive COVID results.”
NO MIGRANT WORK
None of the world’s major rice exports (India, Vietnam and Thailand) use sowers significantly.
They came into play especially in India this year because a lot of thousands of migrant workers from the eastern states of Bihar and Jharkhand arrived at the Northern Grain Belt for the 2020 planting season due to the coronavirus blockade.
This has increased the value of local staff and made it cheaper for farmers to hire machines to plant rice than to pay for contracted aid, said Jaskaran Singh Mahal, director of Punjab Agricultural University.
Agricultural wages have an increase of Rs 1,500 consistent with acre to about Rs 4,500 this year, and manufacturers want a dozen rice transplants on an acre plot.
By comparison, farmers can hire planting machines for 5,000 to 6,000 rupees per acre, which can cover 25 to 30 acres per day, depending on rice producers.
“In addition to helping us save on significant overheads such as water and labor, the DSR is fast, unlike the old approach that is tedious and time-consuming,” said Devinder Singh Gill, a farmer from The Moga district of Punjab, known for his fragrant rice (basmati.
The traditional calls on farmers to sow seeds in nurseries and then wait 20 to 30 days before manually transplanting the seedlings into the planting fields that are up to their ankles in the water.
The planters allow farmers to avoid the level of nursery and plant in the fields.
Water conservation is another key feature of RSD, which is found in a predominantly dry and monsoon-dependent country, such as India.
According to the traditional method, 3000 to 5000 litres of water are used in India to produce 1 kg of rice, the crop that consumes the most water, and the DSR allows manufacturers to consume water at least 50% to 60%, farmers and government officials told me.
The main challenge for farmers employing direct planters is the handling of weeds, which require the application of herbicides during the season.
However, even taking into account the additional prices of these applications, the overall crop load is a particularly low DSR, said Kajal, the farmer from Haryana.
Another disadvantage will be that if you continue through the agricultural belt, there will be mass unemployment in the Eastern States next year.
But farmers say they’ll wait to see the harvest in October before deciding to stick with the generation next year.
“The new generation saves a lot of water and labor savings, but genuine control is productivity and farmers will be completely convinced unless they see an increase in yields,” said Ashok Singh, a rice farmer.
(Reporting through Mayank Bhardwaj and Naveen Thukral; Edited through Gavin Maguire and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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