I mentioned in my last post that one of the new things we’re
looking at here is something called a “paddy transplanter”. Here's a bit of the background.
When a farmer grows his rice, he normally starts by
intensively planting one corner of his field with seeds. After a few weeks,
these sprout into lots of little seedlings which are too close together to
thrive. The farmer then tills the rest of the field (churns it up to aerate it
and kill weeds) and then uproots all the seedlings and plants them out with
more appropriate spacing. This process gives the paddy a head-start over the
weeds and the shock of transplanting causes the paddy to send out more shoots
which increases the yield. This is the process you see rows of women doing,
stooped over in fields.
As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a big labour shortage
problem in Rural India at the moment. Paddy farming in particular requires a
lot of labour, especially during transplanting, harvesting and threshing, and
farmers are finding it increasingly difficult and expensive to find the labour
to help them carry out these tasks. Large farms are now using large mechanical
transplanters which are much faster at transplanting the seedlings, but are
very expensive and not suited to small fields. Currently there is not a product
on the market suited to small-scale farmers and so they are forced to pay
higher prices for labour. These farmers are finding it more and more difficult
to make enough money from growing paddy and so many are giving up on farming or
turning to cash crops such as areca and rubber which make more money but aren’t
as good at feeding the country.
Searching for machines already invented that might be
suitable for small-scale farmers, we came across a manual transplanter which
seems to be used in other rice-growing countries such as China but hasn’t made
much of an appearance in India. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere in
India manufacturing similar machines.
The transplanter at one of the earlier tests
We managed to find one place selling them (imported from
China) and have had some fun showing it off at various agricultural shows since
it arrived a couple of months ago. I’ve actually been very encouraged by the
response of farmers, with literally crowds of them wanting to know when and how
they can get hold of one. It’s also attracted a reasonable bit of media
attention and has made it into a few newspapers (here and here) and local TV.
Doordarshan, a national TV channel also recorded a little feature on us, so I
may well have made it onto national television, but I didn’t unfortunately have
a TV to check if we made the final cut!
As well as being considerably cheaper than any other
mechanical transplanter, this machine is much easier to transport, more
manoeuvrable, easier to operate and maintain because it doesn’t have a motor
and doesn’t have any of the associate petrol costs. Trials so far have seemed
promising, but we need to test it more rigorously in Indian conditions before
we can begin to make it available to farmers. Plans are underway to get hold of
some more of these and test them out with some farmers’ groups through a local
NGO when the next transplanting season arrives in June.
I took a couple of days off over Easter and went to Kerala
for a refreshing weekend at the beach with David and his flatmate, Kevin. This
was my first break of more than one consecutive day since Christmas so I
actually really needed it and it was great to be able to spend Easter with a
couple of other Christians; we even conducted our own Easter service by the
beach!
Kevin catching a wave
