Coronavirus: Labor shortage has forced farmers to innovate and use machines this year
Raipur Jattan / Singapore:
For more than two decades, farmer Ravindra Kajal cultivated rice like his ancestors did – every June he flooded his fields with water before hiring an army of farmers to plant rice plants.
But a shortage of workers this year due to the coronavirus has forced Kajal to change. He irrigated the field just enough to moisten the soil and hired a drilling machine to directly sow the seeds on his 9-acre plot.
“As I was more than quite comfortable with the proven method of growing rice, I opted for the new method with some trepidation,” said Mr. Kajal, 46, looking over his head. field, green with rice plants, in the village of Raipur Jattan in Haryana.
“But I’ve already saved around 7,500 rupees per acre because I barely spent on water and labor this year,” he said.
India is the world‘s largest exporter of rice and the world‘s second largest producer after China. In the grain states of Haryana and neighboring Punjab, thousands of farmers like Mr. Kajal have been forced by the coronavirus to mechanize seedlings.
They are still wary of technology and forgo the age-old use of manual labor.
But Kahan Singh Pannu, Secretary of Agriculture for Punjab, is convinced that a historic change is underway that could dramatically increase India’s rice production, which in turn could impact global markets.
“It is nothing less than a revolution in Indian agriculture,” he told Reuters.
Government officials say the so-called direct rice seeding (DSR) method could increase yields by about a third and reduce labor and water costs.
Government officials say the so-called direct rice seeding (DSR) method could increase yields by about a third and reduce labor and water costs.
DSR machines allow farmers to grow more than 30 seedlings per square meter compared to the usual 15-18 seedlings, said Naresh Gulati, an agricultural official in the state government of Punjab.
The Punjab is the cradle of the green revolution of the 1960s which led to increased crop yields. This year, farmers used seeders to plant rice on more than half a million hectares, a big increase from less than 50,000 hectares in 2019, producers and government officials said.
Pannu expects DSR usage to jump again next year.
“More and more farmers are using DSR technology which looks so promising that the 2.7 million hectares of the Punjab rice area could benefit from it next year, which will be a turning point for rice production in India, ”he said.
Avinash Kishore, a researcher at the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), said if this year’s harvest was good, the DSR would be the way to go. “The scale of this year’s shift to DSR is a momentous change in rice cultivation in India,” he said.
Sudhanshu Singh, senior agronomist at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, said the switch to DSR was “one of the few positive spinoffs from COVID.”
None of the world‘s major rice-exporting countries – India, Vietnam and Thailand – significantly use seed drills.
They have come into play in a big way in India this year because hundreds of thousands of migrant workers from Bihar and Jharkhand failed to arrive in the northern grain belt for the 2020 planting season due to the coronavirus lockdown.
This has driven up the price of local workers and made it more economical for farmers to hire rice planting machines rather than paying for hired help, said Jaskaran Singh Mahal, director of the Punjab Agricultural University.
Farm wages have risen from Rs 1,500 per acre to around Rs 4,500 this year, and producers need around half a dozen workers to transplant rice to a one acre plot.
By comparison, farmers can rent planting machines for Rs 5,000-6,000 per acre, which can cover 25-30 acres per day, the rice farmers said.
“Besides helping us save on major overheads like water and labor, DSR is fast, unlike the old method which was tedious and time-consuming,” said Devinder Singh Gill, a farmer from Moga district in Punjab, well known for his aromatic basmati rice.
The conventional method requires farmers to sow seeds in nurseries and then wait 20-30 days before manually transplanting the seedlings into plantation fields that are ankle-deep in water.
Planters allow farmers to bypass the nursery stage and plant directly in the fields.
Water conservation is another key attribute of RSD, which is crucial in a predominantly dry, monsoon dependent country like India.
According to the conventional method, 3,000 to 5,000 liters of water are used in India to produce 1 kg of rice – the most water-thirsty crop – and the DSR allows producers to reduce water consumption by up to minus 50 to 60%, farmers and government officials said.
The main challenge for farmers using no-till drills is weed management, which requires the spraying of herbicides throughout the season.
Yet even taking into account the additional costs of these applications, the overall cost of cultivation is significantly lower under DSR, said Mr. Kajal, the farmer from Haryana.
Another downside will be that if the method is adopted across the agricultural belt, there will be huge unemployment in the eastern states next year.
But farmers say they will wait until they see the harvest in October before deciding to stick with the technology next year.
“The new technology saves a lot of water and labor, but the real test is productivity and farmers won’t be fully convinced unless they see some increase in their yields.” , said Ashok Singh, a rice farmer.
