Here’s an article that explains the SRI. It’s definitely NOT doable on a huge 1,000 acre scale. BUT for those of us with a fairly large ‘backyard’ and a little free time in the evenings it’s definitely doable. I’m going to try it and see.
And here’s the official page at Cornell:
http://sri.ciifad.cornell.edu/
It’s not just a ‘rice’ specific technique anymore. Some crops don’t do well with transplanting so that’s taken into account for stuff like maize/corn.
One thing I’m not going to do, at least this year, is the ‘aeration tilling’ bit. It’s too iffy for rainfall here in the summer. I hate to have open exposed soil losing all that moisture. And we don’t have any sort of tools to use for that particular task. If you read the SRI materials, they’ve developed specialized mechanical weeders they just roll over the field. BUT, I DO have a whole garden full of soil aerating earth worms. Big giant earth worms and jillions of them so maybe it’ll be a wash for that.
So I’m going to do the early transplanting and spacing for the rice, the spacing bit for the other grains and keep the weeds down with my paper/mulch technique.
I’ve got Hmong Sticky, and Carolina Gold rice started so far. I’ve got blue bonnet ordered and i’m planning on ordering the m-101 rice from southern exposure seed exchange. And, I see Fedco has a short season rice, duborskian, that has grown in maine even. I’m going to have options that will hopefully give me a crop that’s ripe even if we get a september ‘cane. Hopefully if I’m a good girl and we don’t have a very wet wummer I won’t have to worry about disease either with these.
Thanks for the link. An interesting site. I’ll be exploring more on it later. Ever since I found out that I could grow some rice in Milk jugs, I have been thinking about trying it. We have a lot of Milk jugs and I am always exploring ways to use them.