This churned up the soil with small toothed wheels, burying weeds in the soil to decompose. The government was promoting the use of a simple mechanical hand weeder known as the ‘rotating hoe’ (houe rotative). Having started to grow single seedlings in unflooded soil during their period of vegetative growth (i.e., up to flowering after panicle initiation, he kept a thin layer of water, 1-2 cm, on the field), Laulanié next introduced a practice of his own. While rice plants can survive under flooded conditions, they do not thrive. But Laulanié found that they can grow even better if raised in soil that is kept moist but never continuously flooded. It is widely believed that rice plants fare best in saturated soil.
Then, in another area he observed some farmers not keeping their paddy fields continuously flooded throughout the season, as is done around the world wherever farmers have access to enough water to do this. So he tried this himself, and found it was a good practice. These farmers in the minority found that single seedlings produced as well or better than clumps of plants, and this way they could reduce their seed costs, a consideration for very poor farmers. Laulanié found a few farmers not transplanting rice seedlings in clumps of three, four, five or more, as farmers all around the world choose to do, instead planting individual seedlings. There were few scientific resources to draw on in immediately post-colonial Madagascar, in libraries or in research institutes, so he started working directly with farmers, carefully observing their practices, asking questions, trying things out on his own paddy plot.
Laulanié had done a degree in agriculture at the best university in France (now known as Paris- Grignon) before entering the seminary in 1941, so he knew basic agricultural science if not much about tropical rice. It was also essential if continuing destruction of the precious tropical rain forest ecosystems was to be halted. Laulanié concluded, apparently, that raising the yields of rice, the staple food providing more than half of the daily calories of Malagasy households, was the greatest contribution he could make to the well-being of the people around him. He saw also their deteriorating natural resource base, with drastic soil erosion and accelerating deforestation, these two processes being connected. When Henri de Laulanié was assigned by the Jesuit order to move from France to Madagascar in 1961, the first thing he saw around him was the great poverty and hunger of most of the people, one of the poorest populations in the world. This sounds like nonsense but it is possible and true. Part of the resistance came from the innovation’s being so counter-intuitive: where smaller would become bigger, and less could produce more. SRI changes dramatically four practices that farmers growing irrigated rice have used for centuries, even millennia.
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The case is instructive also because it goes against the now popular view that farmer knowledge, being based on generations of trial-and-error and subsequent validation, is a superior source of information and insights about how to practice agriculture. Typical positivist approaches for testing and validating new knowledge were not applicable because larger issues were at stake, ones not amenable to either proof or disproof just by hypothesis testing. In the SRI case, a paradigm shift was involved, one that is not yet fully understood and certainly not universally accepted. Not every proposed change in agricultural practices warrants much attention but if a possible innovation would have many benefits, it should be subjected to empirical rather than just logical tests, because our scientific knowledge is not (and never will be) perfect or complete. This case suggests a lesson for scientists as well as for extension personnel and farmers - for all to be open to new ideas, no matter what their source.
But it is also unusual because of the resistance, sometimes vehement, that it has encountered from the scientific community despite the evident benefits that it offered particularly for poor farmers and for the environment: doubling yields or even more without requiring the use of fertilizer or other chemical inputs, and using less water. It is unusual partly because SRI is one of the most remarkable agricultural innovations of the last century, one only starting to be appreciated in this one. based on 20 years before that of working with farmers to improve their rice production without dependence on external inputs - is a most unusual case. The development of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) 20 years ago in Madagascar by Fr. Father Laulanié at his desk in his Antananarivo home