BE THE SOLUTION TO THE SOIL POLLUTION

2018-December-05

Two-week long 10th Kapilvastu Mahotsav has brought together Agriculture and Tourism related stalls, markets, people, and stakeholders to a common ground.

Some photos of the event.

Hybrid maize seeds assure promising yield

Sonam Wangdi, Phuentshogling

Apr 10 2014

Sadhu-Madhu village under Phuentshogling Gewog looks lush green. After a month of sowing, acres of maize plantation are ready to bear fruits. The promising yield is attributed to hybrid seeds the villagers were provided with.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Forests had distributed five different hybrid seeds to 26 households in the village. Under the programme, ‘Spring Maize Production’, the villagers were also provided two types of local maize seeds.

The villagers have used 30 acres of land to sow the new hybrid seeds.

“We planted the seeds a month back and without so much of a care, the plants have grown tall,” said a villager, Mangso Drukpa. He said it will grow even taller in days to come.

Another villager, Sabitra Mongar, said for someone like her, whose landholding isn’t as much, they wouldn’t have to buy maize from the market, this time.

The Monggar’s Maize Production Coordinator from Research Development Center, Dorji Wangchuk, the programme is to boost mass maize production by the end the current five-year plan. Another objective, he said, is to meet food security and self-sufficiency in the country.

“If we look at our agro-ecological conditions, maize is a very versatile crop. It can be grown under a wide range of environment.” Dorji Wangchuk said in the wake of the changing climate, maize has the higher potential to adapt to different environment.

He said, by growing maize in the paddy fields, farmers will not have to leave their land fallow during dry season.

For now, the seeds were provided to the farmers for self-consumption. However, officials said, even for commercialisation of the crop, there is already a ready market.

“Maize, conventionally considered being a pro-poor crop, now has a huge market potential.” He said private entrepreneurs like Karma Feeds, due to the springing of poultry farms in the country, have a huge demand for the feeds. “Similarly, Army Welfare Project, they require a huge amount of maize for brewing.”

After cultivation of the crop in June, evaluations will be carried out to see the best hybrid seeds that the farmers prefer and only the preferred ones will be distributed to them from the next season.

Similar programme is also being carried out in 300 acres of land spread over the southern belt.

The hybrid seeds were bought from India.

Source & Video

Rinchengang’s rice revolution

By the handful: Wangdue drangpoen Pasang Wangmo inaugurates the first harvest

Double cropping and mechanised farming could bring about a change of fortunes to this economically deprived settlement

Agriculture: Of the many paddy fields that sit on a gentle slope in Rinchengang, one of the poor villages in Wangdue, one is the size of five archery ranges put together, on a flat piece of land.

Along the right side of the Wangdue zam (bridge), the field is filled with full-grown and ripe paddy plants that sway in the breeze coming from the Punatsangchu (river).

The paddy in the other fields near the village is still in the growing stage, with transplantation done a few weeks ago.

On July 19, more than 50 farmers, including agriculturists and senior government officials, gathered at the huge rice field, which is spread across 20 acres, to harvest the crop using a mechanised harvester and pedal thrasher.

Using double cropping mechanism, the first crop was transplanted in March this year. “We could have harvested in the first week of July, but the rain didn’t allow us,” the national rice programme coordinator, Ngawang Chopel, said.

Re-initiated after a decade, rice farmers in Rinchengang village should be able to harvest paddy twice a year. “They should be able start next plantation by the end of this month,” Ngawang Chophel said.

In the second phase, the farmers will grow the IR-20913 variety, which is a short duration paddy, developed using local and imported variety from the Philippines.  This time as well, the government will provide them free machines, seeds and expertise.

The number 11, which the farmers of Rinchengang harvested, is a cold tolerant variety, suitable in high altitude areas like Thimphu, Paro, Tashigang, Tashiyangtse, Lhuentse and Mongar.

Farmers like Dema said that, last year, the harvest was barely adequate for her family of three, and her husband had to contribute labour to earn more cash.

Dema usually collected around 200kg of paddy from her one langdo of land.  With double cropping and mechanised farming, she can now harvest more than 600kg.

A comparative study showed that 4,900kg of paddy may be harvested from 20 acres of land using the mechanised method, as against 1,000 to 1,800kg through traditional farming methods.  Agriculturalists said the increase was mainly because of improved variety and method used.

Until recently, 90 percent of the 83 households in Rinchen chiwo worked as sharecroppers, village elders said. “More farmers became sharecroppers, as land holdings became smaller with expansion of the family,” a village head said.

Mechanised farming will also help produce more in a small land holding, according to Thedtso gewog’s agriculture extension officer, Jamgay Lhamo. “We plan to expand double cropping from 20 acres to 35 acres,” she said.

Double cropping was carried out as a part of a pilot project to revive the programme that was introduced in 1999 but discontinued because of water shortage and damage by pests.

Earlier this year, plantation was done using a Japanese machine planter that took 20 minutes to plant what it took two workers a day.

“I’m hopeful, through the sale of rice, people will become self sufficient. GNH is when we become self-reliant,” the Wangdue drangpoen, Pasang Wangmo said, when the first crop was harvested. “With mechanised farming wives don’t have to complain about their husband running away in farming season.”

Despite, agriculture being the main source of income for more than 900 people living in the clustered village of Rinchengang that faces the burnt down Wangdue dzong, keeping double cropping going is a concern among agriculture officials.

Tuned to urban lifestyles influenced by Punatsangchu project, farmers may discontinue if the government withdrew free seeds, machines and fund for greenhouse. “I don’t know whether they’ll continue when they have to do everything on their own,” one of the rice experts said.

By Tenzin Namgyel, Wangdue

SOURCE

RICE news from Bhutan

Samdrupchholing begins double-cropping paddy

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Aum Rinchen Lhamo, 54 is happy that double paddy plantation on her field is likely to yield well

Reviving a practice that died about a decade ago following security issues

It is not yet season for paddy transplantation, still a patch of paddy field in Phuntshothang gewog, Samdrupjongkhar already wears a green look amid brown untilled terraced surroundings.

It is only towards the end of May that farmers of the gewog begin tilling their fields and transplanting paddy sometime in June.

Samdrupjongkhar’s maximum rice growing dungkhag, Samdrupchholing (Bhangtar) has, this year, begun double-cropping and four households are experimenting to find out how the scheme fares.

Phuntshothang gewog lies at a lower altitude and has no water problem during winter and spring.

Gewog extension officer Choni Lhamo said since the gewog did not face water scarcity, they decided to give double-cropping a try.

“A few farmers approached me to try out double cropping,” she said, adding they then bought three varieties of seeds – 100kg of IR20913, 10kg of hardinand and 5kg of B2983B – from regional development centre in Bhur, Gelephu.

They were distributed among the four identified households.

On January 28, the seeds were nurtured in a nursery to raise them for transplantation, which was done on the first week of March.

A  Phuntshothang farmer, Rinchen Lhamo said double-cropping was not a totally new thing for them.

She said the villagers had always been doing that a decade ago, which fizzled out gradually because of the militant and political problem in 2003.

“I’m trying it again after a long time not because my usual produce is insufficient to feed my family, but just don’t want to watch my land left barren during off-season,” she said. “It’s coming up well, but not as good as in the real paddy season.”

Rinchen Lhamo, who had seven children, has used about an acre of her more than three-acre land to grow paddy this time.

Another farmer, who chose not to take the risk of trying to transplant paddy this time, said growing paddy around this time of the year would expose the plant to pests. “Otherwise this is a good season where irrigation is left all to ourselves since other villagers are not using it,” he said.

Double-cropping was initiated this time, Choni Lhamo said because farmers of Samdrupchholing did not have to plough fields manually as they did in the past.

Farmers have membership with farm mechanisation centre since last year, which allows them to hire power tillers to plough fileds.

Depending on the terrain of their land, farmer are charged Nu 175 an hour as hiring fee.

The machines, agriculture officials said tilled about 50-decimal land within an hour, what otherwise took half a day with a pair of oxen.

“All seeds are improved varieties and were not grown here before,” Choni Lhamo said. “This will be our dry demonstration only. If it goes well, we’ll replicate it next year.”

Phunthsothang gewog has about 500 acres of paddy field.

Besides double-cropping farmers of Phuntshothang gewog have also begun growing mushrooms on straw starting this year in collaboration with regional development centre in Khangma.

However, only five households have tried growing mushrooms, which proved successfully.

Five farmers recently sold about 200kg of fresh straw-grown mushroom for Nu 150 a kilogram.

The four households that have tried double-cropping of paddy are waiting to tell tales of a similar success.

By Nirmala Pokhrel,  Samdrupjongkhar

Source:  KUENSEL

Why Organic Advocates Should Love GMOs

By Keith Kloor | April 12, 2013 4:38 pm

Adapted from the new book The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet by Ramez Naam

What if there was a way to farm that spared the rainforests, cut down on toxins in our soil and waters, and provided healthier, more nutritious food?

Sounds like organic farming, right?  But actually, it’s GMOs.

[Golden Rice, biologically enriched with Vitamin A, will boost nutrition for millions of children. Photo/ International Rice Research Institute]

The goals of organics – farms that cause less damage to the environment and grow food that’s better for you – are great. But organic isn’t living up to that potential.

In terms of nutrition, the consensus of multiple analysis of all the data (like this one from Stanford and this one from the UK) is that it’s more or less a wash. Organic foods, in general, are neither more nor less nutritious than their conventional counterparts.

In terms of environmental impact, one might think that organic farms are the clear winners.  And if you look at what happens on an acre of organic farm land vs. an acre of conventional farm land, that’s correct.  But an Oxford University  meta-analysis of 71 peer-reviewed studies showed that, because organic farms use more land to grow the same amount of food, they erase their environmental benefit and are in some ways worse than conventional farming.

Save the Forests

But even this is under-estimating the impact of organic farming, because the study above didn’t look at the biggest issue of agriculture – the conversion of land from forest to farm.  We use nearly 1/3 of the land area of the planet to grow food.  That, in turn, has led to the destruction of half the original forest on the planet.  Around the world, agriculture drives a whopping 80% of deforestation today. That destruction of forest is by far the worst environmental impact of agriculture, many times worse than the impact of pesticide or

Meanwhile, projections are that by 2050, we’re going to need to grow 70% more food around the world than we do today.  If we did that by maintaining yields exactly as they are and spreading farms, we’d chop down 70% of the world’s remaining forests.  Trying to feed the world starting from organic yields would be far worse, because their yields are lower.

How much lower?  In 2008, the USDA surveyed every organic farm in the US, asking about their yields.  Plant pathologist Steve Savage compared those yield numbers to yield from conventional farms in the same years.  Here’s an excerpt from his summary:

In the vast majority of cases national organic average yields are moderately to substantially below those of the overall, national average.

Examples for row crops include Winter Wheat 60% of overall average, Corn 71%, Soybeans 66%, Spring Wheat 47% and Rice 59%.

A totally separate analysis, from a different group at Stanford, published inNature, found that organic farms around two thirds of the same amount of food, per acre, as conventional farms, meaning that they need one and a half times the land of conventional crops.

The goals of organic are noble, but there’s simply no way to feed the world with yields so low, unless we’re willing to chop down all the forest that remains. Sparing forest means growing more food per acre, not less.

More Foods, More Forest

How do we grow yield?  We could do it by lifting worldwide yields up to US levels.  That would mean giving farmers in the developing world better access to fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation that drive yields up in the US.  Of course, organic advocates would prefer not to use more fertilizer and more pesticides.

Is there another way?  Perhaps – and GMOs may be key to that.  So far GMOs have contributed only modestly to yield increases, but on the horizon are approaches that could make a big difference.

Consider the yields of corn (the most grown crop in the US) vs. those of rice and wheat (the two most important crops for food supplies globally).  Corn grows about 70% more calories per acre than rice or what.  Why?  Because it has a newer form of photosynthesis called C4.  Now, funded in part by the Gates Foundation, the C4 Rice Project is looking to port the genes for C4 photosynthesis to rice.  Other projects are looking at doing the same for wheat.  Those would essentially be rice and wheat varieties with a tiny bit of the corn genome in them (about 0.1%).  And they could lift yields by more than 50% on their own, and more in combination with other advances. They would also reduce water and fertilizer needs of rice and wheat.

So – more food, less deforestation, less water need, and less need for synthetic fertilizer.  Doesn’t that align with the goals of organic advocates?  And is it really profoundly unnatural to create strains of rice and wheat that borrow just a little bit of corn’s genome?

Better for the Planet

Organic advocates also want less pesticide use, in part to reduce toxicity to the environment.   Ironically, GMOs are already doing this.

The National Academies of Science report Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the US says this in the summary:

When adopting GE herbicide-resistant (HR) crops, farmers mainly substituted the herbicide glyphosate for more toxic herbicides.

Glyphosate (roundup) has a nasty reputation, but in reality, it’s dramatically less toxic than older pesticides like atrazine.  And Roundup Ready crops have allowed glyphosate to almost completely replace atrazine on those fields.  How much less toxic is Roundup than atrazine? About 200 times less toxic.

Other GMO work on the horizon could address another complaint organic farmers have about conventional farming – the heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer that runs off and creates dead zones.  GMO farming has already reduced runoff by encouraging no-till farming. But a more radical project is underway.  Legumes like peas and soy don’t rely on nitrogen in the soil for fertilizer.  Instead, with the help of friendly microbes, they extract nitrogen from the atmosphere, where it makes up 78% of the air we breathe.  Another Gates-foundation funded project is looking at ways to give cereal crops – wheat, corn, and rice, for instance – that same ability to fertilize themselves from the air.

Aren’t all of those things improvements?

Better for the People

Finally, there’s the health impact.  Organic advocates want food that’s more nutrition. And they’re skeptical of the safety of GMOs.  Yet the scientific consensus is that the GMOs we’ve approved for human consumption are entirely safe.  Indeed, that consensus is at least as strong as the scientific consensus on climate change.  Almost all GMO safety hysteria comes from a single media-manipulating lab, in France, which has had its work torn toshreds.  Against that, hundreds of scientific papers have found GMOs safe.  Looking at all that data, the American Association for the Advancement of Science concludes that GMOs are safe.  So does the American Medical Association.  So does the European Commission.  Even the French Supreme Court threw out France’s ban on a GMO because the French government couldn’t produce any credible evidence that GMOs were a threat to the environment or human health.

More importantly, GMOs aren’t just safe, they could boost nutrition.  TheGolden Rice project, which engineers rice to produce vitamin A in the edible grain (not just the leaf) could help 250 million children who have Vitamin A deficiency.  (And for those fearful of corporate control over crops – Golden Rice will be free to virtually all farmers in the developing world, and freely replantable. Every biotech company involved, including Monsanto, has waved their patent rights in the developing world.)   Beyond Golden Rice there are many more enhanced nutrition projects in the works.

Inspired by golden rice, a team of Australian researchers in 2011 created an experimental rice breed that boosts vitamin A and also quadruples the amount of iron and doubles the amount of zinc in rice grains.  An international team has taken the same ideas and applied them to Africa’s most common staple crop, cassava, which feeds 700 million people, and created BioCassava, a variant that has increased levels of vitamin A, iron, and dietary protein.

So the next generation of GMOs could boost nutrition, reduce nitrogen fertilizer use, and boost yield, letting us feed the world without chopping down its remaining forest.  Indeed, it’s easy to imagine ‘bio-organic’ farms that don’t use synthetic pesticides or fertilizer, but that do use these genetically enhanced seeds.

Environmentally cleaner, better for the forest, more nutritious, and able to feed the planet.  Aren’t those traits every organic advocate, every environmentalist, and, heck, every person in the world should welcome?

—-

Ramez Naam is a computer scientist who spent 13 years at Microsoft.  He’s also the award-winning author of three books.  His latest, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet charts a course to overcome the  real challenges of climate change, feeding the planet, and a host of other natural resource and environmental threats.

CAS-TWAS President's Fellowship Programme (For PhD Candidates from Developing Countries)

CAS-TWAS President's Fellowship Programme (For PhD Candidates from Developing Countries)

According to a new agreement between the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Academy of Sciences for the developing world (TWAS), up to 140 students/scholars per year from the developing world will be sponsored to travel to China for up to four years’ of PhD study and research.

The CAS-TWAS President’s Fellowship Programme provides students/scholars from developing countries with the opportunity to pursue PhDs at University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and/or institutes of CAS around China.

Application Deadline:  June 15, 2013

• The program has two evaluations each year, one of which is held around the end of April while the other at the end of June, with specific dates to be determined.
• Early applications are preferred.

For more information pls. click on the link below:

http://english.ucas.ac.cn/Pages/Article.aspx?ID=145 

Contact Information

Office of CAS-TWAS President’s Fellowship Programme

University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Add.: 19A Yuquanlu, Beijing, 100049 China

Tel: 86-10-88256424; 86-10-88256206

Fax: 86-10-88256207

E-mail: president-fellowship@ucas.ac.cn

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Anilyn D. Maningas

Assistant Manager II
Office of Scholars' Affairs, Training Center
International Rice Research Institute
Mail:             DAPO Box 7777, Metro Manila, Philippines
Telephone:  +63 (2) 580-5600  or 580-5672  ext 2611 
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Please take note of my new e-mail address:  amaningas@irri.org

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