Experiences of Farmers in India Experiences of Farmers in ... - AgSri

Farmers’ Experiences
religious function. He has also found the SRI crop attaining maturity earlier than the
traditional one (both sets of seeds were sown on the same day). He used no special
tools or machinery in the SRI practice. He obtained a Japanese paddy weeder from
the Department of Agriculture, Govt. of Assam which was used for weed control.
Innovations and modifications
He transplanted 12-day old seedlings in some SRI plots with the spacing ranging
from 35 X 30 cm to 35 X 40 cm. But he could not get any benefit in terms of number
of tillers, rather he found that these plots were heavily infested with weeds. Plots
with a spacing of 25 cm X 25 cm are expected to give more yield because of a
greater number of effective tillers per unit area.
Benefits
The villagers say that they have never seen such healthy crops on that particular
field. Not only is the field on medium land, but due to the absence of flooding
(conventional method), the crop was never good. The whole village is located on
medium land and rice productivity has generally been very poor (6 – 8 q/acre). Now
farmers are talking about SRI and plan to follow Anil Changmai in the coming year.
Constraints in adoption
Changmai has reported constraints in transplanting and weeding. His mother
literally scolded Dr. Bora, when he visited Changmai’s SRI field for teaching her son
a method which causes the women to suffer, though she did express her satisfaction
at such poor land giving good yield. Changmai used a Japanese paddy-weeder for
weed control but reported that the weeder was ineffective in heavily infested plots.
He left two plots without a third weeding.
Lessons learnt
Anil Changmai is upbeat. He is ready to expand the area under SRI. He is also
going to motivate and demonstrate to other farmers. He reports that next year more
than 20 farmers in his village plan to adopt SRI on their medium-land farms. His
grandmother who is about 100 years old and still moves around the homestead,
told him to make another granary for the coming year if his poor lands are going to
yield such crops.
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