Posted on April, 27, 2022 at 09:03 am
Researchers say they are making rice farming in East Africa more sustainable by promoting the adoption of innovations such as recycled crop by-products, improving food security in the region.
The Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Rice initiative for Climate-Smart Agriculture (R4iCSA), involving 5,000 smallholder farmers in Uganda and Kenya, also aims to encourage the use of sustainable management practices such as integrating rice and legume cultivation to improve soil health.
“The research is generating evidence of developed and tested business models in using products and by-products of rice to drive scaling up the models,” says project leader Anthony Mugambi Makona, an agricultural value chains development and market access specialist at Kenya-based Kilimo Trust, which is implementing the project.
Rice by-products can be reused in farming to improve uptake of nutrients and enhance water-holding capacity in sandy soils. They can also make crops more resistant to disease and facilitate the binding and decomposition of plants.
The R4iCSA project has enabled rice farming to be more integrated with other related business models being tested, through the use of products such as biochar, a super charcoal made by heating rice husks without oxygen, according to Makona.
Source: SciDev