How to sustainably intensify organic Basmati rice production in Uttarakhand, India?
Background
Recommendations for crop management are often seen through the lens of a field agronomist who tests different management practices at a research trial. At this scale, resources such as fertilizers and labour are typically optimized to maximize the yield of a particular field, or to minimize the environmental damage per unit yield obtained. In practice, farmers seek to manage the profitability of the whole farm, and need to do so by strategically allocating the land and resources available to them. The BasmaSus project aims to help close the gap in transferability of management induced benefits from the field to the farm scale, by using an innovative approach that couples field experimentation, farm surveys, bio-economic modeling and trade-off analysis in a participatory framework. The research is set in the context of a well-established agricultural development project on fair-trade and organic Basmati rice production in the state of Uttarakhand, India, supported by the sustainability fund of the Swiss retailer COOP, and implemented by Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation (HSI) in close collaboration with Intercooperation Social Development India (ICSD).
Project objectives and approach
The overall goal of the proposed research is to assess the impact of alternative organic rice management practices on the economic, environmental and social sustainability of the farm, by coupling field experimentation, farm surveys, bio-economic modeling and trade-off analysis in a participatory framework. To achieve this goal, we plan to (i) Quantify field-scale greenhouse gas emissions and major nutrient input and loss pathways for eight organic management strategies at the research trial; (ii) Quantify and compare farm-level resource flows (cash, labor, nutrients) upon adoption of different organic management strategies by using a bio-economic farm model with input data collected through farmer surveys and obtained from the field trial; and (iii) Develop stakeholder-driven sustainability indicators and assess synergies and tradeoffs between the management strategies with respect to agronomic, environmental, and socio-economic sustainability dimensions at the farm level.
Collaborators
This interdisciplinary project was possible thanks to the collaboration with various Swiss and Indian partners in research, development and industry.
This project is supported by the World Food System Center, COOP, and the ETH Zurich Foundation.
For further information, please contact Johan Six ()