Sowing the Seeds of Progress and Prosperity in Rice Farming

To feed a rising global population and keep prices stable, it’s estimated that rice production will need to increase by 25 percent by 2050. Added to this, another 10 percent will be needed to make up for reduced yield due to rising temperatures, an effect of climate change.

Most farmers in India – a country that supplies 40 percent of the global export market, and indeed across the other major rice-growing nations in Asia – still use a system whereby seedlings are transplanted into flooded paddy fields. Smallholder farmers, who feed much of the developing world, suffer the rising costs of scare resources and the effects of climate change. These farmers need a better option.

Socio-economic challenges like rapid urbanization in developing countries, disruption to supply chains, the current energy crises, and labor shortages resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, are all putting pressure on rice farmers and the global rice supply.

And when it comes to climate change, rice is both threatened by rising temperatures, and – as a crop responsible for 12 percent of the world’s methane emissions – is a notable contributor to climate change. 

Direct seeded rice can be sown directly into the field and is able to grow without the need for standing water.

Rather than transplanting young rice seedlings from nurseries into flooded paddies by hand, growers can bring modern farming equipment – land-levelers, sowing and harvesting machinery, for example – into the fields to plant and care for the crop. 

Direct seeded rice systems are designed to offer the following environmental and economic benefits, compared with traditional transplanted practices:

• Reduce reliance on standing water
• Reduce methane-generating conditions by removing the need for standing water, compared with flooded cultivation
• Reduce manual labor, including the transplanting process, through increased mechanization
• Lower production costs while maintaining or improving yields compared with traditional transplanted systems.

Additional revenue streams from carbon offsets, incentives from food chain partners, and financial and government institutions all hold the potential to create additional value pools for these direct seeded rice practices.

FarmRise, a smart app that provides smallholder farmers with market insights, weather information, and agronomic advice, will in the near future be used to connect farmers to distributors of inputs, as well to providers of machinery needed for land-leveling, sowing, harvesting, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) FarmRise is designed to support precision spraying via UAVs as part of on-farm input management. This future access to machinery and technology is being made possible through a number of channels, including equipped neighboring or nearby farmers, via BetterLife Farming centers, state-funded or privately established service providers. 

Due to the removal of standing water – which in the transplanted system controls weed growth – farmers need immediate answers to questions about the types of weeds, the availability of effective, affordable and sustainable crop protection products, as well as information about spray timing and application rates. Currently provided by our agronomic experts, over time weed identification and treatment advice as well as seed and plant establishment management will become automated in FarmRise, as well as offering pest recognition capabilities and recommendations based on artificial intelligence.

As direct seeded rice cultivation scales up, geo-tagged information such as weather data, soil data, historic weed-flora data and predictive models will be offered to empower farmers to make better agronomic decisions about weed, pest, water and nutrient management.

We have a vision for the millions of farming families that supply the world with rice: lower costs and therefore higher incomes and improved quality of life, a reduced impact on the environment, and increased food security for our growing world.

Our DirectAcres program began as a 100-hectare proof of concept in India in 2021 and is already surpassing 41,000 hectares today. We are working to expand the DirectAcres program to reach more growers and hectares over the coming years as part of our broader rice sustainability efforts.

There is huge potential to realize these benefits at scale. External estimates suggest a significant share of Indian rice farmers may shift to direct seeded rice by 2040. 

Our leadership and expertise in seeds and traits, crop protection and digital farming solutions as well as the importance we give to building partnerships with those in the industry and beyond that share our vision, paves the way for this oncoming and necessary progression in rice farming.

And finally, this work drives our Crop Science Sustainability Targets 2030 and gets us one step closer to fulfilling our mission of Health for All, Hunger for None.