Crop Residue Management Strategy

More than 80 percent farmers in north-west India cultivate rice and wheat crops in a sequence. After harvest, almost all paddy straw and about 50% wheat stubbles are burnt leading to air pollution and environment degradation. Though burning of straw is legally banned but many farmers continue to burn the straw in the field to facilitate timely sowing of next crop. On the intervention and direction of judicial courts; several options such as making electricity, bio CNG, and ethanol production are being explored by the state governments of Punjab and Haryana. Large scale handling, storage, transport and processing of such huge quantity of straw will have secular implications. The practical, viable and easy approach to manage straw would be to handle it at individual farmer fields and convert it into manure through decomposition by use of microbes and amendments.

An exploratory trial was established to explore the possibility of converting rice, wheat and other miscellaneous waste available at the farm into manure/compost by the use of physical, chemical and biological methods. The treatments being compared included: application of different kinds of manures like FYM, poultry manure; horse manure; press mud; urea and microbes in different doses and combinations. The basic hypothesis was to decompose straw within a time limit of 30-45 days. In case of rice, the loose straw after combine harvest constitutes roughly about 20-30% of total stubble and straw biomass. The farmers can collect the loose straw at one corner of the field. Once the loose straw is managed, wheat crop can be sown by the use of zero tillage machine or happy seeder. The collected loose straw at the corner of each acre can be effectively converted to manure by the use of FYM and microbes. The manure prepared this way will substitute for fertilizers in the following crop.

After the harvest of rice crop from5 acre land, not even a kg of rice residue was burned at the GSF research farm. A part of rice residue was used as mat on the floor under animals (cows, goats, poultry and ducks) during the winter. The straw blended with excreta of animals was periodically removed and dumped into pits for making compost. Major part of rice residue was used as mulch in the furrows between wheat rows planted on ridges. This practice is likely to prove highly beneficial in terms of weed management, water saving, soil health improvement and re-generation of microbes in the soil. The preliminary studies on fast decomposition of paddy and wheat straw using cow dung, horse manure, poultry manure and urea application were initiated. Visual observation revealed that poultry manure followed by horse manure seemed most effective in conversion of straw into manure.