A TECHNOLOGY-DRIVEN sustainable-agriculture solution

Paddy farming in India requires extensive water use. Due to the rapidly declining groundwater and ever-increasing monsoon uncertainty, there is a significant drive on water conservation for paddy farming through sustainable agriculture practices.

The wide depth variability of irrigation water in Indian rice fields, as much as 160 mm, necessitates an extra 100 mm of water in the field to provide complete water coverage. This is primarily due to the inaccurate manual land leveling often practiced in Indian paddy farming. However, accurate laser land levelers have been created by integrating low-cost electronics, hydraulics and global positioning system (GPS) technology.

This paper provides an overview of current practices and suitable operating procedures to meet the future demand for land leveling. The presentation compares the laser land leveler with GPS land-leveling solutions, examining technical differences and individual merits and limitations. In addition, a stakeholder analysis evaluates the various technology solutions for agricultural practices.

Of the world's available cropland, paddy accounts for more than 11%. It is imperative-for agricultural and environmental sustainability, food and water security and greenhouse gas emissions-that paddy rice agriculture is monitored and mapped in a timely and efficient manner. Meanwhile, water-resource management is a major concern because rice paddy is grown in flooded soils. More than 80% of the fresh water in most cases, and as much as 95% in some cases, is used for irrigation in the Asian study area. This degree of irrigation raises concerns about the maintenance and potential contamination of the water supply. Also, greenhouse-gas methane is a byproduct of seasonally flooded rice paddies, contributing to more than 10% of the total methane flux to the atmosphere.

In India, rice is grown over a large area and a broad range of landscapes; a wide variation of climatic conditions exist in such a varied landscape. Thus a variety of unique paddy farming techniques have evolved, based on water source (irrigated, rain-fed, deep-water), crop management (single-crop, multi-crop) and seasonality (wet season, dry season).