Israeli drip irrigation emerges to solve rice paddy problem
Drip irrigation was producing impressive results, doubling water productivity, and "getting more grain for every drop".
By Reuters, December 15, 2020
 |
An employee from Netafim kneels beside an
irrigation system at a research center where the company develops more
efficient methods to water crops in Kibbutz Magal, Israel November 30,
2020.
(photo credit: AMIR COHEN/REUTERS) |
An Israeli company has developed a drip irrigation system
for growing rice to replace the flooded paddies that have supplied the
world with rice for generations but cause a surprising level of damage
to the environment.
Rice
is the staple food for more than half the global population, but its
cultivation uses 30-40% of the world’s freshwater and is responsible for
10% of manmade emissions of greenhouse gas methane, according to the
U.N.-backed Sustainable Rice Platform.
Netafim,
a company that pioneered drip irrigation decades ago to grow produce
like potatoes and melons across Israel's challenging arid landscape, has
just finished a pilot scheme using its technology on 1,000 hectares
(2,470 acres) of rice fields in locations from Europe to southern Asia.
At
one such location, at La Fagiana farm in northeast Italy, two fields,
side-by-side, grow a high quality rice for risotto. One is flooded,
covered entirely by up to 15 cm of water to maintain temperatures and
keep away weeds.
The other is criss-crossed with perforated pipes delivering to the
roots precise amounts of water amounting to less than half the quantity
used on the flooded field.
"We
want to increase the production without increasing water use or
lowering quality," said Michele Conte, whose family has managed La
Fagiana for decades and who has adopted the Netafim system on some of
his land.
For
three years the drip irrigation has yielded rice on par and at times
even better quality than the flooded paddies, he said. It also allows
them to rotate crops throughout the year.
Netafim said it had to learn from scratch how to achieve the same
yield as flooding and it took a decade to create a new protocol for
watering, fertilizing and planting rice with drip irrigation.
The growing conditions switch to aerobic from anaerobic, which means methane emission "goes to zero," said CEO Gaby Miodownik.
Conte said the schedule for treating the rice still needs some fine
tuning but that it has become a selling point for
environmentally-concerned customers.
The
initial investment in pipes, pumps and filters could be expensive for
farmers whose profit margins are, for the most part, already thin.
But
the shift away from flooding is expected to gain traction and companies
like India's Jan Irrigation are developing drip irrigation packages for
rice as well.
Demand
for rice is expected to rise 25% by 2050 and rice paddies leave too big
a footprint, said Wyn Ellis, executive director at the Sustainable Rice
Platform.
Drip irrigation was producing impressive results, doubling water productivity, and "getting more grain for every drop".
Experts agree rice cultivation needs to become more sustainable.
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