The Errant Æsthete

Norman T. Uphoff of Cornell University is all over the world hunger problem like white on rice, reports William J. Broad in the New York Times (6/17/08). Norman is advocating and promoting a new approach to rice cultivation that doubles crops by turning conventional methods inside out. Instead of cramming as many rice seedlings into a field as possible, and then flooding the fields with water, Norman’s recommended method specifies spacing out the plants and keeping the plants relatively dry. The result, he says, is a reduction in costs and a significant increase in productivity.

Norman didn’t come up with this approach himself. It originated with a French Jesuit priest, Father Henri de Laulanie, who, “during a drought, had noticed that rice plants and especially roots seemed much stronger. That led to the goal of keeping fields damp but not flooded, which improved soil aeration and root growth. Moreover, wide spacing let individual plants soak up more sunlight and send out more tillers — the shoots that branch to the side.” This increased the number of grains on each tiller from about 100 to anywhere from “200 to 500 grains.” Father de Laulanie, who died in 1995, called the method “System of Rice Intensification,” or S.R.I.

Basically it’s a quality over quantity play, but even Norman didn’t quite believe it would work when he first heard about it. So, he conducted some tests that satisfied him it was for real and is now spreading the gospel to “India, China, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam, among 28 countries on three continents.” He has also attracted his share of critics, some of whom have conducted their own tests and concluded that S.R.I. doesn’t work. But Norman says they conducted their tests on crappy fields and new field trials are being planned on a global basis. He’s confident S.R.I. will prevail: “It raises the productivity of land, labor, water and capital,” he says. “It’s like playing with a stacked deck.” [via link]