“Why Have Our Farmers & Leaders & Scientists Learned Little To Benefit From The System Of Rice Intensification (SRI) of Fr Henri De Laulanie, SJ?” Asking For A Friend!

The climate has changed for the worse all over the world but the practice of rice farming has not changed for the better as seen in India (above) – and that scene looks exactly like one happening in my country the Philippines. The farmers have not learned – what about their mentors? As a wide-reading agriculturist and infinitely curious blogger, I know they have noteither!

About rice, there is one system of growing this crop that the world’s researchers and farm leaders have largely ignored – System of Rice Intensification (SRI). This is the biggest single scientific discovery about the raising of bountiful rice by any farmer – and yet it remains essentially undiscovered.

Knowledge about SRI first came directly to the Philippines when Norman Uphoff visited the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction (IIRR) in 1997 (Cornell University SRI Rice, sri.ciifad.cornell.edu).

IIRR and SRI happened 25 years ago – Lazy Juan has not stood up to learn what is good for him! That includes rice experts in the whole Philippine archipelago. To summarize their complaints: SRI is laborious. And I agree – only if you look at the farmer having to concoct his own organic fertilizer all the time. But that is focusing on the process and not the results!

In 2019, Indian researchers reported great news about SRI that no IRRI or PhilRice scientists have ever reported! B Lal, AK Nayak, Priyanka Gautam, R Tripathi, M Shahid, BB Panda, P Bhattacharya & KS Rao said (2019, “System Of Rice Intensification: A Critical Analysis” (NRRI Research Bulletin 9, icar-nrri.in):

The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) is perhaps the best current example of options available to farmers and nations to promote community-led agricultural growth, while managing soil and water resources more sustainably and even enhancing their future productive capacity. The SRI, a knowledge-based low-external input technology, developed in the 1980s in Madagascar to benefit farmers with small landholdings, promises higher yields with no deleterious impact on natural resources at affordable costs for poor smallholder farmers. It offers rice farmers yield increases and other benefits whilst using less water, provided this is done in conjunction with other changes in how they manage the plants, soil and nutrients.

The Indian scientists know much – the Filipino scientists at PhilRice do notand the foreign scientists at IRRI do not know much either!

Off-record, I keep hearing the complaint that organic SRI is laborious, messy, too much trouble. Since it’s the Filipino farmers and scientists themselves who are complaining about the labor inputs – and ignoring the harvest outputs – we will never get out of the Lazy Juan Syndrome!

I am not going to surrender to the discouraged and discouragers – in fact, with some friends I have just prepared a project proposal for funding by a non-profit agency. Our project proposal is for a machine designed to create an organic layer automatically – for organic rice – by tweaking an already invented machine. Can you believe it? That will be the day!@517