Is Rice Irrigation Necessary? Yes, With Dammed Water. No, With Organic Water

Your Choice: Dammed Water

Above image is from the cover of the 2016 book Water In Agriculture published by the Asia Rice Foundation, the proceedings of its Annual Rice Forum 2015 "Water In Agriculture: Status, Challenges, And Opportunities" held in Los Baños, Laguna (296 pages).

The Forum proceeded from the assumption that irrigation water is necessary. To summarize the proceedings, we consult the chapter titled "Recommendations" written by Agnes C Rola, Arnold R Elepaño & Emil Q Javier:

#1: Manage R&D.

#2 to #4, #6 to #8: Manage management of irrigation water.

#5: Manage use.

#9: Manage funding of irrigation water.

How crazy are we Filipinos with irrigation water? Infamously insane – We have 30 agencies working on water! (page 30).

So, I leave you to your insanity.

The book ignored opportunities¸so I'm giving you an opportunity – we find it in Recommendation #5 – "Increase irrigation water productivity through promotion of water-efficient technologies." In fact, I am interested only in the 2nd part of that recommendation: promotion of water-efficient technologies. Hence:

My Choice: Organic Water

I have just invented the term organic water. This is the soil moisture made available to plants through the decomposition of organic matter, the source of the water, hence my name of it.

And I am not talking through my hat. I have a brother-in-law named Lorenzo "Inso" Casasus, a farmer in the village of Sanchez in Asingan, Pangasinan, my hometown. He was our farmhand about 54 years ago. it so happened that I was vacationing from my teaching at the UP College of Agriculture, now UP Los Baños. I was minding the plowing of our 1-ha ricefield in the village of Domanpot, near the boundary of Urdaneta City. I told the operator of the big Howard rotavator tractor something like this:

Run your machine over the field
as if you were just passing through.
Do not set any depth of cut, just zero.

Some 40 years later, Inso asked me, in a rare visit at his home, if I remembered the Howard rotavator episode. Yes, I did. Inso said the operator was smiling ear-to-ear, because his fuel cost was minimum! He did not know but my organic matter was maximum! 100%. I knew the rotavator would cut to pieces weeds plus crop refuse plus soil, mix them as it rolled, and leave a layer of surface mulch over that field 2-3 inches thick.

(My original method was inspired by the intellect of American gentleman farmer Edward H Faulkner who wrote 2 incendiary books in agriculture: Plowman's Folly, 1943 and Soil Development, 1952.)

That surface mulch began to decompose immediately to yield its contents of plant nutrients and water. It yielded my organic water and with it, my organic foods for my crop for the rest of the growing season. And so, Inso had done that for 40 years, and his neighbors had been imitating him – except that they did not notice the organic plowing – and so never approximated his much-higher yield.

They had never known the wonders of organic water!@517