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Posted March 9, 2006: Diabou Balde stands
ankle-deep in the grayish mud of her rice paddy and points
to the soggy ridges lined with the bright green rice plants
that will feed her family and provide her with income for
the next year.
Like most of the women in Manthiankaning, a Pulaar-speaking
village of a few hundred an hour or so east of the regional
capital Kolda, Balde works hard in the rice paddies throughout
the rainy season. “The women are out here every single
day, from morning until evening,” says Carrie Miner,
the Peace Corps volunteer who has been living and working
with these women for the last two years.
Rice production is central to the livelihoods of farmers
in Manthiankaning and elsewhere in the fertile Kolda region
southeast of Dakar, Senegal’s capital. The region is
the eastern part of the Casamance, the thin wedge of land
that forms Senegal’s southern border. It is crammed
between English-speaking Gambia to the north—a tiny
country surrounded on three sides by Senegal due to colonial-era
geopolitics—and French-speaking Guinea and Portuguese-speaking
Guinea-Bissau to the south.
Dozens of ethnic groups—Jola, Pulaar, Mandinka, Manjak,
Balant, and Wolof, to name a few—populate this unique
region. High annual rainfall here—often more than 47
inches—makes the area a verdant paradise of lush forests,
mangroves, and wetlands, as diverse in flora and fauna as
in languages and ethnicities. While one of the country’s
most fertile areas, its geographic isolation often led to
neglect of the local population by the national government.
Until recently, the region was the scene of a 20-year battle
between separatist rebels and government forces, further isolating
the region’s population and threatening food security.
Fewer plants spurs greater rooting
During her two years of service, Miner has promoted the
System of Rice Intensification (SRI) in Manthiankaning in
order to boost food production, working with Diabou and five
other women in the village. This innovative approach was first
pioneered in the rainfed, or upland rice fields of Madagascar
and the Philippines. Contrary to what its name implies, SRI
actually decreases the planting density in a given area by
increasing the distance between rice plants to eight inches
or more. This means less seeding and transplanting than usual
in the Casamance, where farmers traditionally broadcast rice
by hand, leading to random and inconsistent stands, or they
transplant rice at a distance of four inches between plants.
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With a MS in soil science from the University of Florida,
Miner was more than adequately prepared to test SRI in the
field. However, conducting agronomic research in a Senegalese
village’s only rice fields was not as easy as it would
have been at a land-grant university’s research station.
“This is all under cultivation,” she says pointing
to the wide expanse of green fields gilded with maturing seed
heads. “There wasn’t a lot of space for experimenting.”
Very few women were interested in giving up even a small portion
of their field to try out a new method, much less a method
that looks risky because it demands a lower planting density
that would seem to promise a lower yield.
It’s true that increasing the distance between plants
and reducing the overall plant density in a given area to
improve yield seems counterintuitive. It works because the
increased space per plant actually triggers more tillering,
or the development of secondary shoots that produce grain.
So while the number of plants may be fewer in SRI, the number
of tillers is generally far higher, resulting in higher grain
yields.
Most of the rice farmers in the village were skeptical of
Miner’s proposal, and only six agreed to participate.
Now, however, most of those trying out SRI are happy with
the results. According to Carrie, only one of the six women
did not like the new system, while the others raved about
it: “One of them even said, ‘Wow, if I’d
known the rice would look like this, I would have planted
it all this way!’”
Tapping into tillering
Miner laid out an experimental demonstration plot of her
own this year, in which she compared three varieties of rice
(a local variety and two varieties developed by ISRA, the
national agronomic research institute) either broadcast planted,
transplanted in the traditional manner after 35 days at four-inch
spacing, or using SRI, transplanting at eight- and 12-inch
spacing. She also wanted to evaluate the effect of amending
the plots with decomposed cow manure, applied at a rate of
four metric tons/ha. While she has not yet calculated final
yield, she has already noticed the superior tillering in the
SRI plots. “We had one plant with up to 42 tillers,
while a lot of the plants in the traditional broadcast plots
only had two or three.”
As elsewhere in the Casamance, rice farmers in Manthiankaning
traditionally break up the soil with a short-handled hoe,
a daba, and pile up the weed biomass prior to broadcasting
their seeds. They then cover the seeds with a thin layer of
soil. Because germination is low, they use an excessive amount
of seed. Emergence is random. Some farmers transplant seedlings
from crowded nursery beds into small ridges at a spacing of
four inches. The ridges are made by flipping soil from one
row to the next each year in order to smother the previous
year’s weeds. Tillering is low in both of these traditional
planting methods due to crowding, late transplanting, or competition
by weeds. “You’re lucky if they get one weeding
in,” Miner explains.
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When asked if she prefers SRI or the traditional methods,
Diabou Balde doesn’t mention the increased tillering,
but notes that the wider spacing allows for easier management:
“This way is better, quicker for weeding, “she
says in Pulaar as Miner translates. “It’s easier
than the traditional method because you don’t have to
add a second layer of soil. It hurts my hands less.”
Many farmers don’t transplant simply because it adds
an extra task to their already exhausting workload. Miner
says, “In the end, it’s a trade-off between labor
and seed costs.” Diabou recognizes this and is diplomatic
in her final judgment. “Both ways have their advantages,”
she says. “We’ll all wait to see our yields to
see which is best.”
The cautious and slow adoption of SRI by rice farmers in
Manthiankaning is typical of agricultural innovation throughout
Senegal and the developing world. With a family’s survival
so tied to the productivity of the land, adopting a new technique
is risky. Nevertheless, some of the women of Manthiankaning
are already convinced that it is a risk worth taking, that
SRI is the way to increase their yields despite additional
labor.
Further down the rice fields from Diabou plot, another farmer
has expanded the number of rows in which she uses the new
spacing. Next year, once her neighbors see the difference,
they, too, will hopefully try out the new practice, little
by little, one row at a time.
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