By Chris Hufstader, Oxfam America (See original post)

Khek Koeu must have been having trouble sleeping at night. Underneath her house were stacks of rice in 50-kilogram bags. She and her daughter grew about a third of it, and they bought the rest after the last harvest. They will sell it later, hopefully at a profit. All in all, it’s worth about $18,000—leaving enough money for Koeu to invest in building a metal fence around her house and yard, with a gate she can lock.

Despite her worry about thieves, having enough rice to lock up is a nice problem for Koeu, a 55-year-old widow in Cambodia’s Pursat province. She says she is now making more money, and growing more rice, since she learned to apply what’s known as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) in 2010. In the past six years, she says, she has finished paying for college for all three of her children, and she bought them all motorbikes. “It’s hard to afford all this,” Koeu says. “In the years before we started SRI we had a lot of difficulties

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From India Water Portal: http://www.indiawaterportal.org/articles/those-invisible-farm-hands

By: Aarti Kelkar-Khambete

Parvati, aged 40, is an agricultural labourer working on the outskirts of Pune. The sole breadwinner of her family, she has not been going for work for three days because of severe pain in the lower back. She asks me for some pills or ointments that could relieve her of her backache. “I go for weeding and need to stay bent through the day. I walk back home after five and then do all the housework. Else, who will do it for me?” she asks.

Agriculture, an increasingly female activity

Agriculture is undergoing a radical change in India with more and more rural men migrating to bigger cities for work, leaving women, children and elderly behind to take care of the land and agriculture. This puts extra burden on women who have their hands full already with household chores.[1] Surveys say that almost 75 percent of women, as compared to 59 percent men, work in the agricultural sector in India [2] and in many parts of India, women generate their income through agricultural activities [3].

“We come by the bus provided by the owner. It takes around 2.5 hours for us to reach here. We need to finish all our work at home, and come here at 9am and work till 5pm. It gets almost dark by the time we reach home. It is hard work but how can we complain? We get Rs 150 per day,” says 43-year-old Sangeeta, another agricultural labourer who works on the same farm as Parvati.

From being cultivators earlier, more women farmers are turning labourers indicating the growing distress in Indian agriculture where families are finding it difficult to hold on to their lands [4]. The census classifies an agricultural labourer as “a person who works on another person’s land for wages in money or kind or share. He or she has no right of lease or contract on land on which she/he works”.[5] Sixty three percent of women in India are agricultural labourers, dependent on the farms of others [4]. In the case of women working on their own farms, it is mainly the men of the house who own the land.

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Ms. Nhem Sovannary, a farmer in Po Preah Sang village, Taphem commune, Tramkak district, Takeo province, was awarded first prize in 2013 and third prize in 2014 during the SRI national competitions, organized by CEDAC. She has 1.5 ha of rice fields, 800 m² homegarden, 8 cattle, 100 chickens and a biogas.

Read the full article on the ALISEA

Read the full article on the Huffington Post

As part of a drive to encourage farmers to adopt the system of rice intensification (SRI) technique of paddy cultivation, District Collector C. Samayamoorthy on Monday honoured a woman farmer from the district who had won a national award for having achieved a record yield.

The woman farmer T. Amalarani of Vasudevanallur in the district, who harvested 18,143 kg of paddy per hectare under the SRI technique, bagged the Union Government’s ‘Krishi Karman Award’ carrying the cash prize of Rs. 1 lakh and received it from President Pranab Mukherjee in New Delhi on January 15.

Read the original on The Hindu

In the State of Madhya Pradesh, the Tejaswini Rural Women’s Empowerment Program* has introduced a new technology for growing rice that is transforming the lives of women farmers.  The System for Rice Intensification (SRI) uses high-yielding certified seeds that are first tested for germination and then sown in a nursery with the right amount of water to ensure quality seedlings.  Within eight days, the seedlings are transplanted to the fields with uniform spacing.  Women farmers are bring trained to use and manage SRI at each critical stage of the process – nursery raising, transplantation and weeding.

Read more in the original article on The Global Harvest Initiative

When Anil Verma’s PRAN (Preservation and Proliferation of Rural Resources and Nature) approached paddy growing women farmers in Gaya district of Bihar, asking them to try SRI (System of Root Intensification) in their fields, he was met with disdainful looks. It sounded too good to be true, especially to farmers who had been growing paddy for generations. One lady, Kunti Devi, stood up and agreed to try it (‘Out of pity for us’, Anil says). Kunti Devi was given a tiny plot of land by the Government of Bihar, but it was barely enough to grow what she needed. After trying SRI, the results from her field were amazing, with her paddy crop getting record yields. She had surplus cash and was finally able to send her children to school.

Read more from the original article on The Alternative

In 2012, Oxfam working with a partner RUDI – Rural Urban Development Initiatives trained Pili on modern rice production techniques, mostly referred to as system of rice intensification. The training emphasized on the use of improved seeds with high yield, proper plant spacing, proper farm management particularly weeding and application of fertilizers.

Pili utilized the knowledge in her farming activities and as a result she has increased her rice yield three-fold.

Read the full Oxfam article here

The Experiences of an SRI farmer Ms. Miyatty Jannah, East Java, Indonesia

Adapted from Report on Visit to Indonesia to Review SRI Progress, January 11-18, 2008 –

Norman Uphoff, CIIFAD

Visit to Aliksa Organic SRI Training Center at Nagrak (Thursday, January 17)

Thursday morning, we traveled south of Jakarta to this training center operated by a new NGO, Aliksa, which is promoting organic SRI production. Victor Lee and I left the hotel in Jakarta at 7:30 accompanied by Ms. Miyatty Jannah,an SRI farmer-leader and one of Aliksa Consultants’ farmer cadre, all of whom are prepared to do training and advising of other farmers for practicing organic SRI. Miyatty had been invited to travel with us because she was one of the few SRI farmers who spoke much English. She gave us a very professional business card, with both home and cell phones listed. She lives in the village of Crawuk, located in Widodaren subdistrict (kecamatan) of Ngawi district (kabupaten) in East Java.

Miyatty’s command of English was impressive, the more so because it was self-taught, having had only three years of formal schooling. Victor told me that Miyatty learned her English as a young woman from watching televisions shows while babysitting in the homes of richer households who had TVs. He commented that the television series ‘McGyver’ had been one of her favorite programs, which explained why, when she responded to my questions, she often said “Yep” instead of “Yes.”

The two-and-a-half hour drive to Nagrak, south of Sukabumi which is south of Bogor which is south of Jakarta, went fast with our conversation. Miyatty cultivates three hectares of SRI rice, one personally and two with hired labor. She cannot do more herself, she said, because she now spends a lot of time in Aliksa activities. (Aliksa is an NGO that promotes organic SRI in various parts of Indonesia.) Her yields have gone from 5 t/ha before SRI to 7 t/ha now, a 40% increase. She is happy with this because her costs have been reduced at the same time.

Moreover, she gets a premium price for her SRI paddy, 300 rupiahs/kg, simply because of its higher quality. This adds another 15% to her income from paddy, over and above the higher yield and reduced costs. She said that she doesn’t have to tell the merchant that the rice is higher-quality SRI paddy; he can see the difference and pays her more for it without any haggling.

When she first heard about SRI, four years ago, she contacted Pak Alik through our Japanese SRI colleague Shuichi Sato and invited him to come to her village and train its farmers in the new methods. [Aliksa was founded by Alik and Sato, a Japanese SRI colleague, hence its name.] Alik brought with him Sutarmin from Public Works (PU) and also a third person. (Sutarmin was already training farmers in SRI methods at the PU training center in Bandung, as noted in my trip report from September 2005: http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu/countries/indonesia/indotrep905.pdf.)

Miyatty personally covered the costs of their stay in her village for four days, training 35 farmers in SRI methods. Only 10 of these farmers would try out the methods, however; and there was a lot of resistance at first, even abuse, she said. “The whole village was against us at first: ‘You are stupid,’ they said when they saw the transplanted SRI plots: ‘You will get nothing.’ ”

There was “really a strain,” Miyatty recollected, “it was really, really hard. People were talking bad things about SRI.” She had to convene many meetings among the ten SRI farmers, to discuss among themselves and to keep them all continuing. “One husband and wife were not talking with each other. They almost divorced. Even government people were coming and asking about this SRI. I explained what I understood, but they didn’t believe me and didn’t support us. But I continued. There were so many problems. Pak Alik came once again, and only 20 of the original 35 farmers were willing to meet with him.”

“But when harvesting was done, people came and said, ‘Wow. How did that happen from such small seedlings?’ All the people were surprised. With less water and less money, we had 40-50% more paddy. People from other villages came and asked us how we did this. So I went to other villages. But always there is the same problem: at first there are lots of tensions and problems, But the problems go away once they see the results.” It is always gratifying to hear this account of the first introduction of SRI among ‘disbelievers,’ although this story is by now quite familiar.
Miyatty added something that was consistent with other reports that I had heard on the social impact of SRI; however, she was more detailed. (Victor confirmed this, saying he has plans to do a video on this subject in her village.) “Now, after harvest the SRI farmers come together, and each household brings one kg of rice and some vegetables and a little money, and they all cook a big feast and eat together.” This sounded like an Indonesian version of the American Thanksgiving holiday. “There is so much solidarity among the SRI farmers,” she added.

We discussed how SRI is spreading in her area, mostly farmer-to-farmer. She is the most active proponent in her area, but other farmers are also helping now. The government efforts so far have not been a big factor. The Department of Agriculture allocated 1 million rupiahs ($100) for a one-hectare demo plot, but the farmer who provided the land and who did all of the work was paid only 150,000 rupiahs, Farmers want to know where the rest of the money has gone, a familiar question.

“The government SRI and my SRI are different things. The government is not successful, because for the officials, SRI is only a project.” However, now officials are starting to take a more positive view of SRI, she said, “not like when I started four years ago. There is a very warm heart for SRI in my area.” All of this was reported matter-of-factly, not boasting, as that would be out of keeping with local culture.

It turned out that Miyatty had met Sato-san first in 1996 when he was working in Sumbawa as a Nippon Koei technical advisor. She had impressed a Japanese colleague of his with her English and her ‘activist’ approach, so he asked Sato-san to try to find some employment for her. She began working in the project office, further improving her English and learning clerical skills. Her acquaintance with Sato-san had made her more willing to give some credence to SRI when she heard about it.

“There is a feeling among farmers that some government people are afraid of SRI, because it is ‘too good’,” she said. “They fear it will reduce their power, because it makes farmers less dependent on them. And there is no way for them to make money from SRI, like they can when they are handling seeds, fertilizer, etc.”

People come to her now to buy her SRI paddy. While the regular retail price is 5,000 rupiahs per kilo, she can get 10,000 rupiahs ($1) for organic SRI. However, only better-off people can afford to pay this price, and at present she has no stock left to sell. So she needs to expand further her production.

We discussed the ‘System of Intensification and Diversification’ (SID) that is being promoted by our NGO partner CEDAC in Cambodia, where smallholding farmers with as little as half a hectare take half of their paddy land out of rice production, and build a fish pond on this land that has been redeployed to alternative production — growing fruits, vegetables, legumes, etc. I will send her the manual that CEDAC has prepared on this with details of five farmers’ experience (manual available at: http://ciifad.cornell.edu/sri/countries/cambodia/cambSidMPREng.pdf).

Miyatty said that this could work well for her since she now has a pump for accessing groundwater and she can control her water use. At the SRI Harvest Festival in Cianjur last July, she was one of 5 farmers who received an award from President Yudhoyono with the promise of a mechanical shredder to make compost more easily. But this has not been delivered to her yet.

Miyatty discussed how Aliksa regards SRI as having ethical, even religious dimensions. It relates to “virtuous” activity, having respect for the environment and bringing opportunities to the poor. Even some imams have preached about SRI in the mosque, she said. It is consistent with the Muslim way of life, which advises people to share, and also to rely on reason rather than passion.

After two and a half hours, we reached Nagrak, where the Aliksa SRI Organic Training Center is located. There we were met by Ahmed Jatika, another founder of Aliksa, who has contributed the land for construction of the center here and also for a training center in Depok, on the southern edge of Jakarta (which I visited the next day). . . .

Full report is at http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu/countries/indonesia/indoNTUtrep0108.pdf

Mrs. Lonah Akumu: One Woman’s Story of Resilience Championing SRI in western Kenya

By: Bancy M. Mati[1] and Kennedy Ouma[2]

The soft-spoken Mrs. Lonah Anyango Okumu is an uncelebrated heroine in her own right. This mother of seven children is a widow who has overcome many odds to bring up and educate her family single-handedly as well as become a leading champion of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), in western Kenya. Born in 1961 in Karachuonyo, Homa Bay County, Lonah later married Mr. Akumu of Ahero Irrigation Scheme in Kisumu rural in 1981. This introduced the young Lonah to paddy rice farming, a rather new experience to her. She and her husband were happily married and were blessed with seven children. The couple cultivated paddy rice under conventional flooded check-basin irrigation, as a source of food and income. Unfortunately, in 2003, her husband passed on, and Lonah was left a widow. She struggled farming paddy rice, raising her family and educating her children all alone. Life was tough as farm inputs were expensive, rice cultivation had high labour demands, while yields were low and thus poor income from rice farming left Lonah with many problems. To augment family income, she sometimes used to work as a casual worker in other farms, while also cultivating her 4 acres of paddy. Moreover, the continuous flooded paddies meant that poor Lonah spent every day of the crop season in stagnant water, exposing her to water-borne diseases.

In 2010, Lonah was among the first batch of farmers from western Kenya who were trained on SRI by Prof. Bancy Mati of JKUAT. She quickly identified with the need to use less seeds, reduced labour for weeding and the promise of higher yields and better incomes from SRI. Thus, Lonah was one of the first SRI adopters in Ahero Irigation Scheme. She was trained as a ToT (Training of Trainers) in 2011 through Prof. Mati’s initiatives in promoting SRI at the time, further improving her skills.

Lonah shows her SRI paddy during an interview at Ahero Irrigation Scheme, October 5th, 2016

Lonah says that at first, she thought SRI is complicated. Before SRI came, when she cultivated rice in conventional paddies, she would plant 25 kg of seed per acre and transplant the seedlings when they were 28 days old. She was not sure the new method would work. So in her first year, she tried SRI on one acre, using just 5 kg of seeds and transplanting 12 day-old seedlings. The crop did very well and she counted 105 tillers on her SRI plot. At harvesting, the one acre yielded 35 bags of paddy compared to the 20 bags obtained from conventional paddies. From that time on, she converted to growing all her rice by SRI method and has never looked back since.

As a woman, Lonah has faced several challenges, especially as a widow. Sometimes there is shortage of water, in which case, men can go out to irrigate at night when water is sometimes flowing, but as a woman, she can’t. She requires capital to buy fertilizers and pesticides, and due to family demands, at times she can’t afford. But even with these struggles, she has remained steadfast as an SRI farmer. As a ToT, Lorna has trained many other farmers on SRI and has been a motivational speaker for the system. Currently in 2016, all her 4 acres of paddy are under SRI. She urges other farmers, especially women, to adopt SRI. It is for this reason that we consider Mrs. Lonah Anyango Okumu a champion of SRI in Kenya.

[1] Professor at JKUAT and SRI Project Coordinator in Kenya

[2] Officer in Charge, West Kano Irrigation scheme, Kenya