Practice What You Preach: Rice Edition

Sure, best management practices sound great in theory, but do they work in reality? Often times, experts preach certain techniques or methods without any first-hand knowledge of their success rates. Well over the next few months, two experts from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) want to change that. They have embarked on the IRRI Agronomy Challenge, an attempt by two experts to grow a high-yielding rice crop themselves at the IRRI research center in the Philippines. Specifically, they are aiming for a 7 ton yield. Their approach:

We have chosen a single field of 0.25 ha size (25 x 100 m), which is quite typical for Asian rice farming. The soil is a deep, heavy clay. The location is in the humid tropics. In the dry season rice needs to be grown with irrigation.
We will obtain all information on recommended Best Management Practices (BMPs) from publicly available IRRI sources, particularly the Rice Knowledge Bank. We will do most field operations ourselves, to experience on the ground what works and what doesn’t. We’ll adjust as we go, just as a farmer would do while learning.
We will explain and document what we’re doing and we’ll share our experiences with you.

One of the experts, Achim Dobermann, described his motivation to take on this challenge as follows: "As a scientist and research leader I have been involved in rice research for 25 years, in many countries. My own research background is in soil science and agronomy, areas in which I have published numerous scientific articles and also a few books. But there is something that I keep wondering about: why is it that many of the research findings and technologies developed by scientists don’t seem to be used by rice farmers?"

This sort of practice, and the accompanying transparency in the results (the two are blogging weekly and recording short youtube videos at each stage of the crop's progression), is very refreshing. Granted, they are using some heavy machinery, so it is not identical to the implementation of rural farmers. But it is a step in the right direction, and hopefully other experts will work to implement their techniques before propagating them!  You can follow along at the blog here to see if they succeed or fail!