From Village Square, author Shreeya Bhagwat –
“More income with less seeds? We’ve been farming for generations. Never have I heard anything so crazy,” her husband mocked. “I convinced him and planted the seeds in five gunthas. Unlike the 100 kg we used to get with the traditional method, I harvested 250 kg, that too at a much lower expense,” she told VillageSquare.in. “Now for anything related to agriculture, he seeks my advice,” she adds with a laugh.
By Chris Hufstader, Oxfam America (See original post)
Khek Koeu must have been having trouble sleeping at night. Underneath her house were stacks of rice in 50-kilogram bags. She and her daughter grew about a third of it, and they bought the rest after the last harvest. They will sell it later, hopefully at a profit. All in all, it’s worth about $18,000—leaving enough money for Koeu to invest in building a metal fence around her house and yard, with a gate she can lock.
Despite her worry about thieves, having enough rice to lock up is a nice problem for Koeu, a 55-year-old widow in Cambodia’s Pursat province. She says she is now making more money, and growing more rice, since she learned to apply what’s known as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) in 2010. In the past six years, she says, she has finished paying for college for all three of her children, and she bought them all motorbikes. “It’s hard to afford all this,” Koeu says. “In the years before we started SRI we had a lot of difficulties
As part of a drive to encourage farmers to adopt the system of rice intensification (SRI) technique of paddy cultivation, District Collector C. Samayamoorthy on Monday honoured a woman farmer from the district who had won a national award for having achieved a record yield.
The woman farmer T. Amalarani of Vasudevanallur in the district, who harvested 18,143 kg of paddy per hectare under the SRI technique, bagged the Union Government’s ‘Krishi Karman Award’ carrying the cash prize of Rs. 1 lakh and received it from President Pranab Mukherjee in New Delhi on January 15.
Read the original on The Hindu
In the State of Madhya Pradesh, the Tejaswini Rural Women’s Empowerment Program* has introduced a new technology for growing rice that is transforming the lives of women farmers. The System for Rice Intensification (SRI) uses high-yielding certified seeds that are first tested for germination and then sown in a nursery with the right amount of water to ensure quality seedlings. Within eight days, the seedlings are transplanted to the fields with uniform spacing. Women farmers are bring trained to use and manage SRI at each critical stage of the process – nursery raising, transplantation and weeding.
Read more in the original article on The Global Harvest Initiative
When Anil Verma’s PRAN (Preservation and Proliferation of Rural Resources and Nature) approached paddy growing women farmers in Gaya district of Bihar, asking them to try SRI (System of Root Intensification) in their fields, he was met with disdainful looks. It sounded too good to be true, especially to farmers who had been growing paddy for generations. One lady, Kunti Devi, stood up and agreed to try it (‘Out of pity for us’, Anil says). Kunti Devi was given a tiny plot of land by the Government of Bihar, but it was barely enough to grow what she needed. After trying SRI, the results from her field were amazing, with her paddy crop getting record yields. She had surplus cash and was finally able to send her children to school.
Read more from the original article on The Alternative
sri4women.blog 