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India: Our phone support centers suck, but wow do we grow rice!

Harambe

Harambe

Well-Known Member
Contributor
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/feb/16/india-rice-farmers-revolution?CMP=twt_gu

Instead of planting three-week-old rice seedlings in clumps of three or four in waterlogged fields, as rice farmers around the world traditionally do, the Darveshpura farmers carefully nurture only half as many seeds, and then transplant the young plants into fields, one by one, when much younger. Additionally, they space them at 25cm intervals in a grid pattern, keep the soil much drier and carefully weed around the plants to allow air to their roots. The premise that "less is more" was taught by Rajiv Kumar, a young Bihar state government extension worker who had been trained in turn by Anil Verma of a small Indian NGO called Pran (Preservation and Proliferation of Rural Resources and Nature), which has introduced the SRI method to hundreds of villages in the past three years.
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A free, non-patented, organic solution that provides a higher yield than anything we've ever seen. 22.4 tonnes on one hectare of land with no herbicides, pesticides, or genetic modification. In other areas, record Potato and Wheat crops.

There are skeptics:

Not everyone agrees. Some scientists complain there is not enough peer-reviewed evidence around SRI and that it is impossible to get such returns. "SRI is a set of management practices and nothing else, many of which have been known for a long time and are best recommended practice," says Achim Dobermann, deputy director for research at the International Rice Research Institute. "Scientifically speaking I don't believe there is any miracle. When people independently have evaluated SRI principles then the result has usually been quite different from what has been reported on farm evaluations conducted by NGOs and others who are promoting it. Most scientists have had difficulty replicating the observations."
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Which means "Hey, I'm doing the same thing you are and not getting the results." Which either means there are falsified claims, they're missing a piece, or they're not doing something right.

I find it interesting that SRI has been around since 1980 when 15M was put into research, but this is making news now. With all the talk of small businesses in another thread, this article underscores some things that small businesses can do(more TLC) to remain competitive.
 
There might be neither fraud nor reproducibility, just the inherent human tendency to remember successes and discount failures.

I recall something from Lysenkoism, where the hypothesis was that when more seeds were planted together, they would not compete with each other, and acting on this helped in a couple of Soviet famines. So, it's not too surprising that giving each seedling less competition for resources might improve yield.
 
Couldn't the soil in that one area have been kickass and thus helped produce so much more?
 
NAOS said:
you guys are failing to take this obvious opportunity to take a low blow at some other, entirely unrelated, Indian industry.
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India is just about as good at planting rice as they are at gang rape.

Did I do it right?
 
babe said:
On a closely related topic, how do you get mentioned in here, Naos?
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Ahh...

First you have to mention something Indians are not very good at and then mention something that they are very good at.

It's not standard format.

I can understand your confusion.
 
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