Here is a recent article on SRI successes in Tanzania (hat tip to SRIRice).
When Habiba Msoga from Kiroka village, in Tanzania’s Morogoro Region, first began applying a method of rice cultivation that was different from what her fellow farmers traditionally used, they laughed at her.But now three years later, as she falls asleep each night in her newly built brick home that will soon have electricity, she could not be happier.“When I started some people were laughing at me because they thought it was impossible to grow rice without flooding the field. But I have proved them wrong. My harvests now are just too much,” the 37-year-old mother of three told IPS.The article focuses on the changing climate patterns necessitating a shift to conservation agriculture (and water-management techniques like SRI). It also touches upon the low uptake of SRI by the farmers in Ms. Msoga's village:
Only Msoga and 267 others – a fraction of the village’s almost 3,000 farmers – joined the project as not everyone was keen to embrace the System of Rice Intensification or SRI.The method is different enough that farmers are usually skeptical everywhere. In Tanzania, this study discuses farmer adoption specifically, deciding that there is great potential in the practice but further extension efforts (and a local-level policy framework on shared water use/management) are needed. The study also pointed to India as the source of the SRI knowledge, which seems to be the common SRI dissemination country these days (despite its origin in Madagascar).
One final SRI link: Hybridizing Technology: The Case of Rice Farming in Nepal
This article sums up my feelings on SRI, basically that farmers are smart and will adopt or adapt aspects of SRI as they see fit. It should never be promoted as a defined prescription, but rather as a set of best practices to be modified by the farmer as needed. In Nepal:
Farmers tried to adapt SRI to their agro-ecological and socio-economic system, choosing some of the practices best suited to them and their particular fields. This taught us, as an extension agency, to rethink our technology dissemination process for different type farmers, and to begin providing them with a set of options that are flexible enough to allow farmers to choose appropriate for their particular situation.
