Designer Crop. SSI Sugarcane & Copenhagen Calls

HYDERABAD - All roads lead to Copenhagen this week but, Robert Frost-like, I have decided to take the road less travelled by, because I want to make a difference. So, from India, I'd like to offer one crop as model for all Copenhagen crops from now on: For all crops must from today relate to the best of Copenhagen, or else remain anti-climate change action.

Copenhagen! You have heard from 64 aggie scientists and leaders their plea, "Food Security and Climate Change: Call for Commitment and Preparation" (you can find their names if you click that link, at americanchronicle.com). They are telling you that millions of poor farmers must learn to adapt to the changing climate; scientists must teach them many how-tos; science must help them mitigate much of the adverse impacts; and the Copenhagen Treaty must advocate for them.

Copenhagen! If not the whole of agriculture, I am personally asking you to just consider one input of agriculture, the non-traditional, out-of-the-box Designer Crop: SSI Sugarcane. Sweet Revelation. Sugarcane, with which India is #2 in the world.

This species is not just your ordinary Saccharum officinarum but your noble cane, the one that has been called by many other name but is just as sweet:
Arabic qassab es sukkar
Bengali aankha
Chinese hong gan zhe
Danish suikerror
Dutch sukerriet
Finnish sukenruoko
French canne a sucre
German zuckerrohr
Hebrew kaneh
Hindi sakhara
Ilocano unas
Indonesian tebu
Italian canna da zucchero
Japanese satou kibi
Khmer ampeu
Korean sa t'ang su su
Laotian o:yz
Malay tebu
Nepalese sahacar
Norwegian sukkerror
Portuguese cana de assucar
Punjabi gacnaa
Russian trostnik sakhamyi
Sanskrit Ikshava
Spanish cana de azucar
Swedish sukkerror
Sundanese tiwu
Tagalog tubo
Tamil kaarumbu
Thai oi
Urdu gannaa
Vietnamese cay mia.
Except for the Ilocano entry, which is from me, this list is from the University of Melbourne (plantnames.unimelb.edu.au).

Sugar from sugarcane is honey without the sting. SSI Sugarcane, I did call it, a discovery name. Despite a long tradition and a large area planted to the crop (4 million hectares), India's sugarcane average productivity has remained low. So we find this old, tired crop that a team has re-created in India, via the ICRISAT-WWF Project called "Producing More Food Grain with Less Water: Promoting Farm-Based Methods to Improve Water Productivity," the one with which they came out with the Sustainable Sugarcane Initiative, SSI. The team members came from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT and the World Wide Fund, WWF, the project based near Hyderabad, at the campus of ICRISAT in Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh. In March this year, the partnership came out with the SSI Training Manual for improving sugarcane cultivation in India, and it's rich, very rich. In fact it's the richest manual for sugarcane that I've seen. And this time, I dare say:

What's good for India is good for the world.

I'm speaking as a not-so-poor farmer's son, worldwide reader, creative writer in science, indefatigable blogger, licensed teacher, and proud aggie graduate from the University of the Philippines' College of Agriculture, UPCA in Los Baños, Laguna, some 60 km south of Manila. UPCA has since graduated to become UP Los Baños, but it no longer has a BS Sugar Tech degree, which is strange because in Laguna itself and nearby Batangas Province, we have sugarcane plantations. It must have been that while UP Los Baños had always been pro-poor, it finally decided that sugarcane was not a poor man's crop. That was poor thinking.

Copenhagen, it's not perfect, but the SSI sugarcane manual coming from India is as bright as can be - eclectic, pioneering, bold and smart in meeting the need for global warming action through the practice of agriculture that answers the needs of farmers.

I've called the SSI sugarcane growing system neo-agriculture (for more details, see my "Sweet Revolution, 2009! SSI gives birth to Neo-Agriculture," americanchronicle.com). Today, I want to designate the sugarcane crop grown the SSI way as Designer Crop, as I realize that it is a crop that has been designed to save the farmer 7 things:
(1) water
(2) seeds
(3) chemical fertilizer
(4) invasions by pests
(5) planting times
(6) croppings
(7) high cost of learning.

With apologies to Stephen Covey and his bestselling book, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," which has sold more than 15 million copies (shopping.yahoo.com.au), I will now discuss my own list of habits based on the SSI training manual and using the SSI sugarcane as model crop for Copenhagen:

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Farmers

(1) Saving on water.
Deducting the cost of precious drops of water that would otherwise be wasted. Under SSI, you are instructed to scrimp on irrigation by a technique so simple why didn't you think of it before!? Alternate furrow irrigation - you irrigate every other furrow; by that, you can expect to save 50% on water. Otherwise, sugarcane gobbles water. ICRISAT has another water-saving technique, the African Market Garden, a low-pressure drip irrigation system developed with the support of the International Program for Arid Land Crops, IPALAC; this is designed to save you 80% on water. You better believe it!

(2) Saving on seeds.
Deducting the cost and handling of unnecessary materials. Under SSI, you need only to prepare single-budded seeds (setts) and grow them in the nursery, in trays filled with coconut coir, an inexpensive water-holding growing medium. Instead of the usual 16,000, you need only plant 5,000 setts, so you save about 75% on seeds.

(3) Saving on chemical fertilizer.
Deducting the cost of greenhouse gas emission arising from the manufacture of fertilizer. Under SSI, you need only to buy inexpensive organic fertilizer, or make your own compost. I like Edward H Faulkner's idea of trash farming with which weeds, crop refuse and green manure are incorporated with the topsoil as organic matter and mulch (David Kupfer, 2001, organicanews.com), which in fact becomes your compost pile already in place. You can also try what ICRISAT calls microdosing, the 3-finger-pinch or beer-cap fertilizer technique, which has been successfully used in Africa, for instance increasing millet yield by 70% on the average. Director General William Dar of ICRISAT tells us microdosing has been successfully tried by now by more than 12,000 farmers in Africa (Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali) with the assistance of African Development Bank, BMZ/GTZ, CORAF, FAO, TSBF-CIAT, USAID, and the University of Hohenheim / University of Kassel.

(4) Saving on invasions by pests.
Deducting the cost of chemical pest control and, therefore, minus greenhouse gas emission. Under SSI, you are instructed not to depend highly on chemical pesticides and weedicides. Instead, you should try biocontrol. For instance, release the Sturmiopsis parasite for early shoot borer control, Trichogramma chilonis for internode borers, and Isotima jaensis for top borer. Weeds are also pests - trash-mulching will save you the expense and energy necessary for chemical weed control.

(5) Saving on planting times.
Deducting the energies for repeated land preparations. Under SSI, you are advised to practice ratooning, or after the plant crop to cut off the stubbles just above ground level, using a sharp blade to make clean cuts and faster work. Other farmers can only do 2 ratoon crops; following SSI advice, you may be able to do up to 6 ratoons and expect high yield each time.

(6) Saving on croppings.
Deducting the multiple risks of monoculture. Under SSI, you are encouraged to practice intercropping. Since you plant the setts under wider spacing between rows and hills, you can very well intercrop potato, wheat, cowpea, bean, chickpea, green gram, watermelon, and many other crops with sugarcane. The intercrops will also help you control up to 60% of the weeds at the initial stage because the denser canopy deprives the weeds of sunlight, that energy for photosynthesis that all green plants need for growth. And you have the extra incomes from your intercrops.

(7) Saving on high cost of learning.
Deducting the costs of mistakes. The SSI manual was produced after extensive research and verification by the ICRISAT-WWF project team and with inputs from well-known sugarcane farmers, experts, institutes, agencies, as well as based on personal experiences of the project staff. They have learned from their own mistakes; with the manual, you already have learned, and you can avoid their nameless mistakes.

7 times Saving! Those are The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Farmers.

With all that risk reduction and those savings in costs, and with a 50% higher yield each time, you get what you deserve: a higher net income. SSI sugarcane makes farming a very good investment package, indeed.

So, to avoid raising trouble, in raising cane, cultivate the 7 SSI Habits!

So, Copenhagen, tell the farmers to grow the Designer Crop, SSI sugarcane - using less chemical fertilizers and more organic matter, using less pesticides and more biocontrol methods, using less water and more water-conserving methods, and using the ratoon crop more than twice. It's good for the environment; it's good for you; it's good for us. In fact, it's excellent.

Copenhagen! Do you dare to ignore Agriculture, the Mother of Industry? I dare you to ignore The Designer Crop, the mother of many industries. May I remind you that this is the crop that is the main source of sweetness in all tropics and subtropics, grown in 16 million hectares in 80 countries, with Asia as the largest grower followed by Europe (ikisan.com). Out of the Horn of Plenty comes syrup, jaggery, molasses, fodder yeast, yeast for humans, baker's yeast, alpha-amylase, wax, rum, glucose, sorbitol, fuel for engines, liqueur, preservative for fruit and meat, citric acid, ethyl alcohol, lactic acid, oxalic acid, monosodium glutamate, lysine, acetone, polystyrene, polyethylene, even synthetic rubber (pakissan.com); paper, cardboard, mulch, compost, animal feed, fuel for the kitchen; and folk remedies for various complaints: arthritis, bedsores, boils, cancers, colds, cough, diarrhea, dysentery, fever, hiccups, inflammation, laryngitis, opacity, sores, sore throat, tumors and wounds (hort.purdue.edu).

Copenhagen, I offer you the SSI sugarcane as the model climate crop for the world: wallet-conscious on water, stingy on seeds, miser on fertilizer, and yet plentiful in yield and abundant in income. Copenhagen, you must signify reduced energy as input, and SSI sugarcane agriculture can show anyone multiple ways to reduce energy. Those who have eyes, see.

Why sugarcane? It's a crop familiar to all peoples. It's for both the poor and rich farmers. An SSI sugarcane village economy can be characterized thus: Decreasing seeds, water, fertilizer; increasing work opportunities, labor productivity; and multiplying effects of sugar as it goes into numberless products. Vibrant village life.

Copenhagen, I am convinced that as a talking point, an SSI sugarcane system has the appropriate networked focus on sustainability, components all for one, one for all: crop, products, energies, people, and environment. That, Copenhagen, is as bright as you can be, if you're smart enough.