Alternative production methods could dramatically alter the amount of greenhouse gas methane that rice farming produces.
Methane is produced by microbes that feed on organic matter in rice fields as oxygen levels deplete in flooded fields.
One solution is alternate wetting and drying. Draining and reflooding the fields three or four times during the growing season, can reduce methane emissions by at least 50%,
Read the story @DW
Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from irrigated rice cultivation through improved fertilizer and water management
Annually, Bangladesh consumes about 2.9 million metric tons of urea and about 60% of this is used in rice cultivation. Therefore, this could contribute to increasing atmospheric pollution due to increased CH4 and N2O emissions. Increasing nitrogen-use efficiency by adopting urea deep placement (UDP) could reduce environmental pollution including mitigation of GHG emissions compared to conventional nitrogen management through broadcasting methods or the adoption of integrated plant nutrient systems. Moreover, UDP could be more effective in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions when combined with alternate wetting and drying irrigation.
An assessment of irrigated rice cultivation with different crop establishment practices in Vietnam
Crop establishment, which often receives insufficient attention, is one of the major rice production operations that should be considered when promoting sustainable rice production practices. There are available options for crop establishment, but a major research gap is quantitative data on the best approach in terms of sustainability. This study compared four crop establishment options: manual broadcasting, blower seeding, drum seeding, and mechanized transplanting.
Determinants in the adoption of alternate wetting and drying technique for rice production in a gravity surface irrigation system in the Philippines
In Asia, AWD technology is a well-known low-cost water-saving technique for irrigated rice. Despite the potential benefits and significant efforts of creating awareness, AWD scaling and adoption remain low in the Philippines. One of the key challenges in the public-managed and large-scale-gravity irrigation system is economic incentives. The decision on AWD adoption was assumed to be influenced by a combination of socioeconomic factors, institutional arrangements within the irrigators’ association, and biophysical conditions relative to the distance to the water source.
