Better Farming Series 20 - Upland Rice (FAO - INADES, 1977, 30 p.) People need more rice to eat (introduction...) Traditional cultivation of upland rice Disadvantages of traditional cultivation

Better Farming Series 20 - Upland Rice (FAO - INADES, 1977, 30 p.)

People need more rice to eat

1. In many parts of the world people eat a lot of rice.

But nowadays more people eat more rice than in the past.

Rice is 8 very good food.

In order to live, digest, work, resist the cold and the heat, people need foods that give them strength.

These are called energy foods.

Rice is an excellent energy food.

Rice keeps well.

Rice does not rot if it is protected from damp.

Rice can be kept a very long time if it is protected from rats and insects.

2. But some regions do not produce enough rice. Nearly all the countries of Africa have to buy rice abroad.

The countries of Africa spend on rice imports a lot of money that could be used in other ways.

If Africa produced more rice, it could sell rice to other countries with a large rice- eating population. In this way Africa could earn more money.

3. Farmers must therefore produce more rice.

There are many regions of Africa, for example, where rice can be grown: along the banks of streams and rivers, around dams, at the bottom of valleys.

But in order to increase rice production, it is necessary to adopt modern methods of rice cultivation.

In this booklet, we shall speak only about upland rice cultivation. In Booklet 21, we speak about wet paddy rice cultivation.

The two methods of cultivation are quite different.

Head

Traditional cultivation of upland rice

4. Farmers work only with the hoe. They do not prepare the soil properly.

Farmers apply neither manure nor fertilizers: the rice takes all the mineral salts out of the soil and the soil soon loses its fertility.

After 2 or 3 years of rice crops, the soil must be left fallow, to rest.

This means that new fields have to be cleared.

With the traditional method of growing rice, farmers have little work to do, but they produce and sell little rice.

Yields are low.

Disadvantages of traditional cultivation

5. Traditional methods use simple tools only.

When farmers have burned the brush and cleared the field, they cannot prepare the soil properly, because they use only a hoe.

They can only scratch the earth and mix the ashes into the soil.

Like this, farmers cannot get a good harvest.

Brush fires ruin the soil.

Fire destroys the organic matter. It is true that the ashes enrich the soil, but the burned vegetation produces no humus and does not improve the soil structure.

Fire leaves the soil bare: erosion is more severe.

The soil is not loosened.

Water and air do not penetrate into the soil.

Roots cannot go deep enough into the soil to take up water and mineral salts.

The plants are not well nourished.

They do not produce many large grains of rice. The harvest is not plentiful.

6. No fertilizers are applied.

When a piece of land bears a crop for the first time, the plants take up all the mineral salts for their nourishment.

The soil soon becomes very poor.

After two or three years, the field must be left fallow. It takes a long time until the soil is again fertile.

Farmers have to leave the old fields fallow and to look for new fields: this is called shifting cultivation.

7. It la time to stop shifting cultivation.

With shifting cultivation, a great deal of land is unused and yields no crop.

With shifting cultivation, farmers have to do a lot of work in clearing new fields every year. They often lose much time when crops should be sown.

The population is increasing. Bigger harvests are needed to feed it.

There is a very modern method of growing rice. But farmers cannot adopt this modern method at once: they have not enough tools and not enough money.