Isabela Principle. 2: In rain, don´t look at the water!

Revised 11 June 2010 at 1226 hours, Roxas, Isabela

ROXAS, ISABELA, Northern Luzon, Philippines (10 June) - Global warming calls for global thinking and local action. I happen to be in the agriculture sector, being a graduate of the College of Agriculture of the University of the Philippines (1965), being a popular science writer and an environmental journalist, and having inherited a handful of hectares of ricefields in far-flung Isabela, so my theory and practice is in farming. Not that I have plans to be a farmer myself, but my mind refuses to give up on how farmers in the Philippines can go from poor to rich.

This morning, I uploaded my essay "Isabela Principle. 1: In dry, don´t look at the water!" (ICRISAT Watch). In it, I introduced actually 2 principles, not just 1. One: The New Farm Principle: To be successful, a farmer must become an entrepreneur. Two: The Isabela Principle: You must have control and continuity in order to grow. I explained that continuity refers to working links, stability, and minimization of interruptions in the business of farming. This 2nd essay runs parallel and completes the story began in the 1st – this is the flipside of the same coin.

Yesterday, the rains came to Burgos and now the fields are flooded as you can see. When it rains, it pours.

And now the question: Why are the ricefields flooded when it rains? And now the answer: Because the paddies are designed so that they can hold water for as long as the farmers want. Farmers´ fields don´t have poor drainage - they have none. The drainage is the hole they punch into the lower dike out of which comes the excess water.

As far as I know, the flooding of the ricefields is an idea that came from my alma mater, now known as UP Los Baños. Global warming aside, is the flooding of the ricefield really necessary? Not if you compare traditional rice cultivation with the system of rice intensification, SRI, which is "a methodology for increasing the productivity of irrigated rice cultivation by changing the management of plants, soil, water and nutrients" that results in water savings of 25 to 50% (ciifad.cornell.edu). That to me indicates that farmers are wasting up to 50% of irrigation water because of the wrong notion of flooding the field.

In the Philippines, irrigation water comes mostly from hydroelectric dams. The San Roque Dam located in the towns of San Manuel and San Nicolas in Pangasinan can irrigate year-round some 708 square kilometers of farmlands in Pangasinan, Nueva Ecija and Tarlac (Wikipedia). That´s theoretical. In fact, that depends on how much water the reservoir, which is 1.2 kilometers long and 200 meters high, actually has in store. Watershed WYSIWYG: What you store is what you give.

In Isabela, the Magat Dam can provide the irrigation needs of farmers in nearby towns only if the reservoir reaches the standard level for irrigation of 156 meters (Ellalyn B De Vera, 11 May 2010, mb.com.ph). The other major dams in the country have in fact showed decreasing levels of water "due to the impact of the El Niño event," according to the news report.

De Vera´s report is, to say the least, inaccurate. The real reason that those hydroelectric dams have seen decreasing levels of water in their reservoirs over the decades is that their sources of water, which are the forests upstream, have been used and abused and not conserved. Conservation WYSIWYG: What you save is what you get. Without forests, you don´t have a watershed; if your watershed is inferior in quality, which means you hardly have any forest at all, you hardly have water to collect in a reservoir for any hydroelectric dam.

Now, the forest and the farm have something in common when it comes to this important liquid: They have to conserve water. The forest conserves water by growing trees that build a rich soil underneath the canopy that acts as both the storage and source of headwater for rivers and streams - and therefore hydroelectric dams. That forest soil is organic matter that transforms into humus, which is the storage and source of plant nutrients and water. Cut down most of the trees of the forest and you cut down on the amount of humus on the forest soil. Hardly any forest humus, hardly any headwater for any hydroelectric dam. Except for springs, the forest humus is the real source of the water that flows downstream.

Likewise, farms that do not build a layer of organic matter on their topsoil are deprived of humus and therefore of stored nutrients and stored water. You can see these farms bare and dusty or cracked and hard in the dry season. These are the soils that require lots and lots of fertilizers. These are the soils that easily get flooded and eroded during the rainy season and easily scorched during the dry season.

Dry season or rainy season, I have to remind the farmers in the Philippines and the rest of Asia about the Adarsha watershed lesson courtesy of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, ICRISAT whose Director General is William Dar, a Filipino. The Adarsha villagers rebuilt their watershed from a picture of devastation to a picture of health through revegetation and water impounding structures that also contribute to groundwater replenishment.

The law in the Philippines mandates that each municipality build water reservoirs; these reservoirs will serve as catchments for rainwater. But these are not enough. A whole watershed in each municipality will have to be restored, and the Adarsha lesson is that success depends on the villagers´ participation in a huge effort designed for the common good. Government investments are not enough in themselves, neither new and improved technologies from research and/or development agencies. A major part of the Adarsha watershed lesson is that people must empower themselves.

Aside from the Adarsha watershed success story, there is another ICRISAT watershed triumphant story, that in a cluster of villages in the Bundi District in Eastern Rajasthan in India. The villagers worked for free to help build structures to conserve soil and water: 200 staggered trenches, 290 percolation pits, and 6 gully plugs across an area of 45 hectares. The villagers planted grasses and saplings all over. To harvest and store moisture in the same place where vegetation was being restored, the people put up stone bench trenches, contour trenches and catch pits. The water conserved helped turned the grey area into green so much so that even during the drought of 2000 that continued up to 2003, this Bundi watershed turned green. A watershed of unending green is an unending well of water. Good for the cattle, the wildlife, the crops, and the humans.

As I revise this on the evening of 10 June at Burgos, Isabela, the rain has been pouring in buckets since about an hour ago. Coming back from Roxas a few minutes ago, we could see that the rainwater had nowhere to go but stand in those ricefields. Since there is too much water on those ricefields already, this is so much waste of rainwater.

Aside from rebuilding their nearby watershed to replenish the underground water tapped for irrigation and reinvigorate the rivers and streams tapped for both energy and irrigation, our farmers will have to conserve water right there in their own fields. They will have to do some organic farming, which I briefly described in the earlier essay "Isabela Principle. 1: In the dry, don´t look at the water!" (10 June 2010, ICRISAT Watch). They have to build the humus on the top soil by trash farming, by green manuring, by introducing and incorporating crop refuse on the top soil. Using a rotary tiller, the organic matter is first shredded in 1 or 2 passes, then on the 3rd pass incorporated into the top soil. The soil-organic matter mechanical mix will transform in a short while into humus, which is the essence of organic farming.

When the rains come and your field has that organic mix in the top soil, no soil erosion occurs, no rainwater runs off with the soil nutrients, and there may be overflowing of water but there is no destructive flooding. In such a case, when it rains, you don´t have to think of the water!