I’m preparing to harvest a revolutionary rice.
It will boost yields, reduce labor costs, protect the soil, conserve water, and fight climate change.
It’s hard to believe that a single crop could accomplish so much, but this is the new reality and future of rice cultivation in India.
The world needs this innovation. Rice is the primary staple food for more than half of the planet’s population. Because of this, nothing can have a bigger positive impact on agriculture than an improvement in rice production.
We owe this remarkable advance to a groundbreaking technology that gives rice plants a unique ability to defeat weeds. It’s called HTR, short for “herbicide-tolerant rice.” Used in conjunction with direct seeding, it promises to let rice farmers like me achieve new levels of productivity and sustainability.
It also sidesteps a dispute that has delayed agricultural progress in the developing world.
Until recently, most herbicide-tolerant crops have utilized GM technology. Scientists have modified their genetics to withstand the herbicides that farmers use to control weeds, which steal moisture and nutrients from the crops we need. Biotechnology applied in this manner has transformed the way farmers produce cotton, corn, and soybeans, helping them grow more crops on less land than ever before.
HTR, however, is different. This herbicide-tolerant trait was introduced using conventional breeding technology that farmers have used for millennia to create our most popular and familiar grains, vegetables, and fruits. Most of our crops have evolved through conventional breeding in ways that make it impossible to survive in the wild. Yet they flourish under a farmer’s cultivation.
The revolution in rice is just the latest success story in this proud history. It began when researchers at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research learned how to add the trait of herbicide tolerance to basmati rice, which is widely grown in northern India. When they did, I announced my hope that HTR would come to include the non-basmati rice we grow in the southern parts of India.
It turns out that I didn’t have to wait long. Scientists at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University swiftly introduced HTR into a variety of non-basmati rice already familiar among rice farmers using conventional breeding technology. Last September, I became one of the first farmers to plant a variety of HTR whose technical name is Co51. I expect to harvest it by February 10.
This gives me an amazing new tool to grow rice, and it’s made even better because I’ve joined it with a technique of direct seeding, in which we plant our rice directly into the fields where we’ll harvest them rather than starting them in a nursery and transplanting them to fields later. It allows me to harvest as many as 10 days sooner than other approaches.
HTR and direct seeding combine to deliver a wide range of benefits. One of them is the simple fact that they require much less backbreaking effort to protect the rice from weeds. This saves on costs and frees manual laborers to engage in other pursuits.
Even better, though, is the fact that this new way of rice farming demands much less water.
The traditional method of weed control for rice farmers involves flooding fields. This is effective, but it comes at a cost. It starts with the water itself, which is now one of our most stressed natural resources. Then there are the side effects. The massive weight of these deluges—about 200 kg per square meter—crushes the soil, altering its physical structure and inhibiting aeration. Finally, the flooded fields with stagnant water emit methane, which is a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.
Because of the synergy between direct seeding and HTR, we’re saving water, guarding the soil, and addressing the challenge of methane emission as a contributor to climate change.
The advantages of HTR and direct seeding are so compelling that I expect farmers across India to change the fundamentals of how they grow rice. Not everybody is willing or able to become an early adopter, so it may take a few seasons. Seeing is believing and success is contagious.
Unfortunately, activists have already started opposing HTR. These campaigners put politics before science, and have caused great harm in the developing world, and especially in India, where they’ve generated an unfortunate amount of skepticism and blocked advances in crops such as brinjal and mustard, to the detriment of farmers and consumers.
Public and private institutes must work collaboratively to educate farmers about the nuances of this groundbreaking technology and dispel the myths propagated by anti-science activism.
Then our rice revolution will be the new normal in agriculture, ensuring a sustainable and prosperous future for rice cultivation.
