A visual tour of SRI

I've been thinking and reading and writing about the System of Rice Intensification (SRI - explained a bit here) for the last few months, so one of the cool things about being in Haiti is getting to see it in practice. And getting to share it with you, my faithful reader(s).

Regardless of which system a rice seed is destined for, it begins its life in a nursery, typically a small section of one's plot. You can see one here, in the middle of the picture:

While your seedlings are starting, the remainder of your land gets tilled - twice. In the picture above, they haven't tilled yet because they haven't had water for a few days.

If you're doing SRI, you then trace gridlines, 20cm apart, across your plot. These gridlines are a guide for transplanting the rice seedlings. This is important because with SRI, you have to weed a lot, and if you have straight lines you can (theoretically) use a mechanical weeder. Once you've drawn your grid you transplant individual seedlings, 8-12 days old, in a grid pattern. (This is very different from traditional rice, in which big clumps of seedlings, several weeks old, are transplanted at random and closer together.) Here's what it looks like:

See how tiny the seedlings are?

And then the teeny seedlings multiply! Here are some seedlings that are about a month old:

The other notable thing about SRI is that you let the soil dry out for a few days at a time, then flood for a week or so, cycling through wet and dry periods. Dry periods aerate the soil and encourage the roots to reach down to look for water, which makes the plant stronger. 

But there are two problems with this flooding and drying cycle. When the field is dry, weeds pop up, so you have to spend a bunch of time weeding. It also requires an ability to manage your water pretty carefully: you have to be able to drain your water off of your field at the right time, and you have to have access to water when it's time to flood again. These two challenges are basically the foundation of the research I'm doing here. Stay tuned.

Here's what a field of SRI looks like. Notice the straight(ish) lines:

For contrast, here's a non-SRI field, which stays flooded all season.

And then, if all the SRI evangelists are right, the SRI plants will grow up big and strong and produce more rice than you know what to do with! I won't be here to see that, at least not on this trip.