SRI Rice on Clubhouse

Description

The system of rice intensification (SRI) is an agroecological approach to rice cultivation that seeks to create optimal conditions for healthy plant growth by minimizing inter-plant competition, transplanting widely spaced young single seedlings, and optimizing favorable soil conditions with organic amendments, increased soil aeration by weeding, and controlled water management. These practices improve rice plant growth with yields up to three times more than with conventional cultivation methods, and increase crop resilience under biotic and abiotic stresses. As SRI methods have been found repeatedly to evoke more productive and robust rice phenotypes from given genotypes, its use has spread, and the methodology has now been validated in >60 countries. During this process, the practices that apply SRI’s basic principles have been diversified and modified. For example, SRI is now applied for rainfed rice, not only to irrigated cultivation; direct-seeding is becoming an alternative to transplanting for crop establishment. SRI principles have also been extrapolated to other crops, such as wheat, sugarcane, millet, mustard, teff, etc.