The Rice Contract Farm and its stages of SRI

Numbering from left to right, up, down. Click on any picture for a larger view. 

These pictures are taken of PASALI’s Rice Contract Farm August to October 2011 which is one of the two modes of the System of Rice Intensification PASALI applies at the moment:

- the Farm Support Scheme for SRI is the project-based farmer trainings mode
- the Rice Contract Farm with SRI is the investment-based mode that runs as business, must make a profit like business but has an built-in land redemption scheme for farmer households.

Photos by operations managers Mary Dawn Mantala and Marilyn Ty
Edited by Shane Pulmano

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Land preparation

  

 
1| The tractor practically sinks if the boys don’t hold it up. This piece of land has the issue of too much ground water. To prevent the weeds from growing as fast as the rice like last crop, operations manager Tata had it tractored.
2| PASALI uses the tractor and the carabao. The carabao pulls the plough and the leveller.
3| Farmer Bra sets up the dikes to wall the prepared fields.
4| The fields are ready for planting.
5| The tractor is transported back to PASALI’s technical center after the day’s work is done.

Seed selection, germination (part of vegetative stage)

  

  

1| The Rice Contract farm applied two ways of planting: transplant and broadcasting. Here the seed is broadcasted thinly on the places where lines meet on a marked field. When the seedlings sprout, they will be thinned out leaving only the one closest to the middle of th hill.

2| Gamai and Bani carefully select good seed using the egg-salt water method: mix salt with water and when the egg floats then the mixture is good. The seed is put into the container with salt water. The good seeds sink to the bottom and the bad ones float. RCF’s seed rating so far is 85% good.

3| Good seeds are then put in sacks and soaked.
4| Germination: seeds that have begun to sprout.
5| Seeds for transplant are either broadcasted directly onto the seedbed,
6| or in containers like the banana trunks (which will then be directly transplanted to the fields at 8-15 days),
7| or broadcasted over sacks of meal then covered by straw. However, this last system we will not do again since it leaves the roots short and soil-less.

Transplanting (Vegetative stage)

  

  

  

1| Seedlings are manually transplanted 8-15 days on a grid pattern of 25x25cm. 1 seedling per hill. The Rice Contract Farm’s youngest seed is at 11 days, and oldest is at 14 days. The youngest ones did not yellow after transplant unlike the 13-14 day ones, which indicates less stress on the plant roots.

2| On the day of transplant, the seedlings are uprooted at the seedbed, preferably gently with roots as long as possible and with still soil stuck between the roots. Seedlings are not smacked on the water like conventional transplanting and left uprooted for day but are directly planted.

3| RCF farmer technician Hari marks the field to a 25x25cm grid pattern before transplant the field.

4| Transplanters are briefed before planting on the proper SRI planting. Older transplanters are harder to teach, refusing to follow instructions, therefore the Rice Contract Farm chooses young, inexperienced planters instead who are not used to the conventional way of planting.

5|  Ideally, seedlings are planted 1-2cm from the ground and with the roots and plant forming an L. The planter uses his or her finger to create the space for the plant, and not the plant as tools to push the soil.

6| Older uprooters used to conventional uprooting have stopped wacking the rice over the water’s surface, but they still uproot in ways that leave the roots short. Will new uprooters please stand up?

7-8| The number of transplanters per hectare can vary from 7 (according to experienced SRI farmer) to 30. The contract farm hires 21-27 planters who finish one hectare in one day. We expect to lower the number each planting time since the planters’ pace will quicker with each experience.

9| Both management, farm teams (the duo responsible for day-to-day work on the fields), and hired help come out to plant.

10| Here seedlings are visible small. We plan to enlarge the seedbed, applying SRI principles right from the seedbed on and not just after transplant (which is the current practice). This should give the seedlings more room to grow, and become larger at the same number of days.

Tillering (vegatative stage)

1| At almost 1 month after transplant, one seedling has grown into 15 tillers.
2| When you see how small these seedlings are, you can understand how farmers have a hard time believing that one will really grow to become many tillers. Enlarging the seedbed should help increase the size of seedlings.
3| - 7| The care of these plants are: broadcasting rice hill over the fields and the canal to limit the movement of golden snails, flash flooding for watering then immediate drying to prevent golden snails from eating away the plants, weeding three times before the flowering stage, and adding measured nutrients after each weeding session.

  

1| Weeding can be done with the mechanized weeder, the manual weeder and manually. We've done all three. 
2| The current model of the motorized weeder has tall blades. The Rice Contract Farm recommends all models could be made with 'lower' blades so they wont hit the leaves as the weeder passes the plants, and that models could be made with three blade sizes to match the space between plants as they begin to tiller and expand in roots. 
3| Weeds are best removed when they are still small. 
4| - 5| If left unchecked, they will overun the field. One of RCF's teams met broken weeders but rather than manually weeding, they waited until fields were overun with weeds. So now even though their field was planted first and will be 2 months on on October 31, plants are the same height as the plants planted weeks later. RCF management then hired extra hands to weed the place before the plant reaches its 2 months age. From 2 months on the flowering will start, and the field should not be disturbed for optimal growth. 

 

Next up: Reproductive Stage (panicle initiation, booting, heading, flowering)  and the Ripening Stage (flowering, milking, dough stage and maturity)
Challenges and Discoveries, The Faces of the Farm

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