For Farmers in Bihar, A Simple Solution for More Crops

Courtesy of Raksha Kumar Susheela Devi, left, with her husband Bhim Singh on their field in Muzaffarpur district, Bihar, on March 20.

MUZAFFARPUR, Bihar â€" On a recent spring afternoon, Susheela Devi, 50, was excitedly preparing to sow maize and okra on her one-and-a-half-acre plot.

While farmers in many parts of India have seen crop yields fall in recent years, due to decreased rainfall and as an aftereffect of a fertilizer-heavy “green revolution” in the country that started in the 1970s, Ms. Devi and thousands of small farmers in Bihar are seeing the opposite.

For the last four harvest seasons, her yield has increased nearly 70 percent every season. She has doubled her annual income to 100,000 Indian rupees a year. This year, “I will earn a lot more from vegetable sales,” she said while raking manure, a huge smile on her face.

Ms. Devi is one of the 103,028 small farmers across 9 districts of Bihar who have adopted a new system of seed treatment and planting that uses no chemical fertilizers or herbicide. The system has been so successful that it will be rolled out across all of Bihar’s 28 districts in the next year.

Since she started the program, developed by a partnership between the Bihar state government and the World Bank, Ms. Devi has cleared her debts with the local money lender, gotten two of her daughters married and enrolled her son into college. Previously, “we couldn’t dream of this kind of a financial independence since we owned only a small plot of land and the yields were perpetually low,” she said.

The program, called the System of Crop Intensification, or S.C.I., is simple. Farmers carefully nurture a small number of seeds, and then transplant them into fields one by one, while controlling the water input. The method takes less water and produces much stronger plants than the traditional method of planting the three or four seedlings together in waterlogged fields.

A recent study co-authored by the World Bank estimates that the small and marginal farmers that have adopted S.C.I. in Bihar have witnessed a productivity increase of 86 percent in rice production and 72 percent in wheat. The profitability of cultivation has increased 2.5 times for rice and more than 80 percent for wheat. Similar trends have been observed for oilseeds, pulses and vegetable productivity by participant farmers.

“Basically, it is counterintuitive,” said Norman Uphoff, a professor of international agriculture at Cornell University. “We have always believed that more is better.”

“We crowd seeds and end up with less productivity,” he added, “but that is wrong.”

Farmers using the S.C.I. method plant their seeds with a few inches of space between them in a grid pattern, keep the soil relatively dry and carefully, manually weed around the plants to allow air to their roots.

Professor Uphoff estimates there are now five or six million farmers using S.C.I. worldwide, with governments in China, India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Vietnam promoting it.

S.C.I. seems to be everything that the Green Revolution in India of the 1970s was not. It doesn’t rely on new seed varieties, expensive pesticides or chemical fertilizers. Crops are sustained by manure from farm animals. While the Green Revolution was based on high inputs and high returns, the S.C.I is based on more returns with less inputs and focuses on sustainability, says Mr Anil Verma of the non-profit Pradhan.

Since S.C.I. is labor intensive, it is easy for small and marginal farmers to adopt it, but large farmers have struggled because of the labor costs.

Ms. Devi tills her land in her village of Niknama herself. She cannot afford help as labor costs are very high, just like the 108 other farming households in her village, she said. The handful of large landowners in her village haven’t taken up this system as their labor input costs would not allow them any profits at all if they did, she said.

S.C.I. is just one of a host of potential solutions to the world’s food problems that draw on traditional agricultural methods. Farmers should be offered options from which they can choose and adapt what works best for their own conditions, said Bas Bouman, the director of a research program at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.

“There are more approaches out there with similar results,” he said. “The Australian Rice Check system, the Integrated Crop Management in Indonesia, and the ’3-Controls’ in Guangdong, China to name a few.”

For Indian conditions, though, the S.C.I. model seems to be working really well.

A study published in February PLEASE LINK PDF by the Economic and Political Weekly, a research journal, looked at 13 major rice-growing states in India, and found that fields using S.C.I. had significantly higher average yields than fields that were not.

“Can the System of Rice Intensification be the answer to meet the country’s future rice demand” the study asked. The rice yield of the country can significantly increase under S.C.I, the study states, and lists some constraints that have to be tackled before this can be achieved.

Bihar’s economy centers around agriculture, with about 75 percent of the labor force in the state employed in the sector. The vast majority of these farmers, nearly 93 percent, are considered “small and marginal” farmers, owning two acres of land or less.

When the S.C.I. system spreads to all of Bihar, about two million small farmers will be affected, said Arvind Kumar Chaudhary, chief executive of the Bihar Rural Livelihood Promotion Society, the partnership between the Bihar government and the World Bank.

Most of these will be women. Women in Bihar often work in the fields, while their husbands travel for work outside their villages. Ms. Devi said she now enjoys her work in the fields, and has the added benefit of her husband’s company.

“Earlier, we knew we’d have to work several hours for a little produce. It didn’t inspire us to work,” she said. “Today, my husband and I happily work on our fields together, he doesn’t need to go out of the village for work anymore,” she said.