SMALL is beautiful, but not always sufficient - and this
is the shortcoming that a new Filipino farming technique
seeks to tackle, This method, called conservation. farming, uses the natural forest as its model but makes traditional practices more scientific and systematic and does
away with costly and possibly damaging pesticides and
fertilisers.
. Conservation farming is specially relevant to India
because out of its 88.5 million landholdings, 33.8 million
are less than half a hectare each. As these often constitute the farmer's sole means of livelihood, farmers would
gain considerably if they adopted conservation farming
for their landholdings would then yield more without
added expense.
A forest regenerates itself from fallen foliage and
diverse animal, insect and microbial life - a capacity
mcploited for centuries by the slash-and-burn technique,
biown as jhum' in India. This technique gives over-
worked soil a chance to recover, but as land becomes
scarcer, jhum farming becomes untenable.
In Nairobi, when the fallow periods became far too
short, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture
developed a system in which leguminous plants were
planted along with food crops to restore soil fertility. In
many Asian countries, there is atradition of planting
leguminous shrubs and trees as fencing for ricefields and
kitchen gardens.
Having worked with farmers from India, Bangladesh,
Kenya and Guatemala, IIRR assistant director Raquelito
M Pastores explains, "Everything we do here is drawn
from the knowledge of the people." The IIRR programme
is being implemented in several villages near Cavite and
it has been explained at international workshops.
IIRR's agro-forestry package is based on cultivating
rows of fast-growing, multipurpose, nitrogen-fixing trees,
including subabul (Leucaena leucocephala), gliricidia
(Gliricidia sepium) and bara salpan or bhalia (Flamengia
macrophylla).
"There's a certain magic about the fast-growing multi
purpose trees", says Pastores. "They have the ability to
sprout fresh s 'hoots from the stem when lopped repeatedly and to regenerate about 5 tonnes of leaf and an equal
quantity of wood within a year of being lopped." In one
experiment there was a 28 per cent increase in rice yields
when loppings of Leucaena, planted five metres apart on
paddy bunds, were added to the soil.
IIRR recommends trees should be spaced upto four
metres apart, and advises the use of local varieties,
though many of these are slowly disappearing. Its advice
is based on the poor performance of imported seeds,
which proved particularly susceptible to pests.
For woodlots, IIRR recommends a mixture of quick-growing fruit and timber trees. Says Pastores, "In the
Philippines, we promote fruit varieties such as custard
and star apple, guava and mango. It is these that make a
woodlot complete."
URR encourages farmers to grow Leucaena on hillside
contours..as a soil erosion barrier and practise alley cropping, which involves cultivating rice, corn or vegetables
between rows of trees. The leaves are used as fodder and
fertiliser and the branches as firewood and stakes.
Because fodder is vital for livestock development,
IM promotep "intensive feed gardens", in which grazing
grass is grown between rows of multi-purpose trees, with
two-thirds of the tree leaves going to the soil and one-third to animals. An area of 100 sq m cultivated this way
can reportedly feed upto six goats, besides also reducing
fodder-foraging time.
The new system, says Pastores, aims at improving the
nutrition of smallholder families. "Our experience is that
bio-intensive gardening almost always obtains higher
yields than conventional methods," Pastores explains.
"Our approach is to first train people as garden promoters (which includes Ein understanding, of nutrition) and
these promoters then go back to the village with seeds
and other requirements. When
they demonstrate the efficacy
of the bio-intensive methods,
peasant families often come
forward to learn and share in
LMR advocates the skills."
One method of bio-inten
cultivating crops sive farming is cultivating
crops that have different root
with different root lengths, as this reduces the
rate of soil exhaustion because
each plant taps a different
lengths. layer of soil. Also, the root
hairs left behind in the soil
after harvesting contain valuable organic residues, which
fo ter earthworms. These worms then produce twice
th! ir weight daily in worm casts rich in nitrogen, potassionate and phosphorus, which enrich the soil.
Planting a variety of plants also limits pest infestation
and disease. Here, too, cultivation of local plants is
encouraged because they are more disease-resistant. Says
Pastores, "We find that aromatic plants such as marigold
and garlic are excellent insect repellants."
Diversity in a small space needs careful planning.
Vegetable plots are usually divided in four, with rotational growing in each plot of leafy vegetables, such as
mustard and lettuce; fruit vegetables, such as brinjal and
tomato; root crops, such as sweet potato and radish, and
legumes, such as winged bean and pigeon pea. IIRR
researchers estimate a family can obtain upto 2.7 kg of
vegetables a day from a 46-sq-m plot, prepared with
loose soil to improve water retention. The plants are
placed close to each other, with their leaves overlapping,
to save space and water and reduce evaporation.
IIRR's emphasis on the natural and the practical is
one of its most striking features. It has drawn up a list of
pesticides based on local vegetation, which includes
ground custard apple seeds, crushed chilli, wood ash
and neem extracts (See box). Also on their list are rich
compost brews evolved from ash, eggshells, seashells,
fishmeal, bonemeal and farm vegetation. Nets are sometimes used to protect plants from pests. Pastores estimates the methods they have listed can eliminate more than three-quarters of pests.
But not everything in the garden is rosy. "Some people
are not receptive to the technology, especially those who
don't own land," says Pastores. "They ask us why they
should take the trouble to contour the land,
make hedgerows, dig-, canals, prepare beds and
replenish the soil with cb4npost, when it's not really
their land."
Conservation farming is labour-intensive and in some
countries, including the Philippines, extra help is hard to
obtain. As the average daily wage for a farm labourer is
50 pesos (about Rs 55), "the young just don't find it
-worthwhile to remain on our farms any more," says
Pastores. IIRR encourages mutual help groups to over-come this problem.
Many conservation farming techniques need to be
adapted to specific social and economic conditions and
these are still being refined. In the early 1980s, for example, Leucaena was avidly promoted by conservation
farming enthusiasts as the answer to disappearing grassland pastures. Fodder trees are the need of the hour, was
their call and Leucaena was hailed as a miracle tree. But
with the finding that Leucaena leaves contain a high
level of mimosine, an amino acid that can taint milk and
cause hair loss, the miracle was tarnished. However, scientists have concluded since that toxicity is not a problem if Leucaena is mixed with other feed.
Perhaps the strongest argument that can be made for
conservation farming is that it has the potential to deliver
more food, fuel and fodder to the developing world's
poorest farming commimi ies. These are the farmers who
are already squeezed by skyrocketing prices of fertiliser,
pesticides and fuel and the change in world market
demands from food to cash crops.
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