Rice is life. Life is rice.

            Rice. It’s what’s for dinner. And lunch. And breakfast. Everyday.

            If you don’t have enough money, you might not eat rice 3 times a day, and that is not good. It varies from region to region, with some eating other root crops more often, but rice is the Malagasy “white food,” and in my area people like to eat it for all meals. It is not an easy concept to convey that Americans eat a different food for every meal, and there is no single base for all meals, or no “white food”. Sometimes they will alternate with corn or boiled cassava root for lunch; it depends on the kind of work they are doing.

            Rice is the main dish, and the side dish is called a loaka. The ratio of rice-to-loaka is the reverse of what you might see in the US. A few spoonfuls of loakais sufficient for a heaping plate of rice. And I mean HEAPING; enough rice for our whole family at home might be enough for two people here, maybe one if they have been working hard. And my neighbors are always working hard.

SRI

SRI (System de RizicultureIntensif in French) is a new technique that I’m trying with my neighbors. It was developed in the 1980s here in Madagascar, and has taken off in a lot of other rice-producing countries, but has yet to be widely adopted here where it started. It does not require different seeds or other inputs. Instead, it changes the way that you plant and maintain the rice. The yields can be exponentially greater for the same amount of land AND less rice is used to plant and therefore more can be eaten!There are a lot of NGOs working with it, and Peace Corps also tries to work with it a lot.

The base idea is this: transplant young seedlings (8-10 days only) one-by-one in a grid pattern and with enough space for them to grow well; weed the rice often (the grid pattern allows for using a push-weeder); keep little-to-no water for the majority of the growing period to allow enough air to get to the roots.

Traditionally it goes like this: transplant seedlings after a month or two (30-60 days!) in clumps of 3 or more; transplant them fairly close and without a pattern; keep water on the field at all times; weed occasionally.

There are a lot of advantages to the SRI method, but it is scary to change things when their ancestors have done it a different way for the last 2000 years, and the initial labor is higher. The labor should exponentially pay off in the long-term, but for planning the here-and-now, it seems like an awful lot of work. To compound that, when learning a new method, things take longer until you get the hang of it so it seems like double the work.

I’m really optimistic about this method because I think it makes sense for the growth of the plant, but it’s hard to put theory to practice. People in my area have expressed interest in it, but it’s also hard to convert that enthusiasm into time, fields, and labor set aside to actually do it.

So far I have worked with one family to plant about 800m² of SRI. It’s going, but there were some hiccups so it’s not as spectacular as I had hoped. Luckily they are very enterprising and not easily discouraged, so they say that they are already pleased with the results and think that next year it will be even better. Hooray for them!

There are two other families that will be transplanting within the next week. Their fields are already muddied (hoed, weeded, and trampled into the right consistency of mud) and the rice has been sowed in the seedbed. I’m hopeful for these next two fields, since we have already learned a few lessons from the first batch.

These are all close neighbors, and I think for this year that will have to be enough, and next year hopefully the results from these fields combined with showing the SRI films a few more times will make it easier for me to work with people in other villages in my area.