Achieving Genetic Potential of 2-3 X Higher Grain Yield with Norman Uphoff

Hi, friends, this is John, and this is the Regenerative Agriculture Podcast. Thank you for being with us and for listening. Today I have Dr. Norman Uckoff from Cornell University. One of the themes that I've spoken about a bit in the past is the idea that we're harvesting only a fraction of the inherent big potential that our seeds and our plants are really capable of producing. And one of the developments along this line that I have been very intrigued by and excited to share with you is the system of root intensification that Dr. Uphoff has developed. So, Norman, welcome to the podcast. I'm very glad to have you here. And I don't want to describe too much of your background in my own words because it is very rich. And I'd love for you to just tell us a little bit about your pathway and the work that you've engaged in over the last decades developing this different model of growing plants.

Okay. Well, I grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin, just south of Madison. So I am a farm boy originally. But I had the good fortune to go to the University of Minnesota and then to Princeton, Berkeley to prepare myself for the social sciences of, of development in Africa, Asia and Latin America. And for my first 30 years of professional work, I was focused on things like water use associations, farmers organizations, women's groups, local government, decentralization, and so forth. But then in 1990, I was appointed the first director of our Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development, which was set up in 1990 with a very generous, at that time, anonymous gift to work on problems of sustainable agriculture and rural development. The third year into my 15 years of tenure, I was asked to go to Madagascar by the USAID mission out there. And so I went with a colleague of mine from Cornell who was francophone and who spoke French, that is, and also knew more about rice than I did. Dairy farming is very different from rice farming. And so John and I went out there to look at the project USAID had funded to help conserve the rainforest area, which was under challenge and was dwindling because of slash and burn agriculture. And the first morning I was out in the field with John, it is some of the poorest villages I've ever. And I've been in quite a few countries. I remember attorney John saying, you know, we've really got to get the rice yields up here. They're only 2 tons per hectare. The world average is about 4. So it's half the world average. And as long as they produce so little rice on the available irrigated area, they have. They're going to have to go into the forest and cut down trees and do slash and burn agriculture. And he agreed. And when I got back to town and nari the capital, the Malagasy project coordinator who I talked to, who had a background in agriculture as well as conservation, said, you know, you're right. I agree with you. Would you like to talk to a small NGO that does something called system of rice intensification? I remember telling Benjamin, I don't know much about rice. I know even less about Madagascar. If they know both, sure, I should talk to them and see what I can learn. So he arranged them to come over to our office that afternoon, and I started explaining what I thought the problem was in Benjamin translating to Malagasy. And I still remember the NGO president sort of leaning forward as I talked. And when I finished, he waved his hand and said, pas de problem. No problem. And he said, we have a system of rice intensification which uses the same seeds as before, uses compost instead of chemical fertilizer, and uses maybe half as much water as with usual irrigated rice production. And we get yields of 5, 10, even 15 tons per hectare. And I imagine my eyebrows went toward the ceiling. You can't do that. The Green Revolution uses new seeds, uses more agrochemicals, and also uses more irrigation water. Here they're doing none of those. And they're getting 5 or 10 or 15 tons per header, where average in the country is about 2. And I remember thinking to myself, actually, I think I said it too. I said, let's not talk about 10 or 15 tons, because nobody at Cornell's is going to believe that. I didn't say I don't believe them. No one at Cornell. Cornell will believe it. And they didn't mind my thing. We aim for maybe three or four tons per hectare. We worked out an agreement. We had USAID funding for this. So their NGO would provide four field staff to train farmers in these new methods that had been developed by a French Jesuit priest who had been living in Madagascar for over 30 years at that time. And turned out by the end of the first season, they could only get 38 farmers to try these new methods because they're quite counterintuitive. But their average yield was 8 tons instead of 2. And these are on soils that North Carolina State University had studied for a PhD thesis, some of the worst soils they ever analyzed. Very low cation exchange capacity in all horizons. Ph is 3.8 to 5, because it means they're very acid. And the available phosphorus is Less than half the minimum of 10 parts per million that most aggressors thought was necessary for even the poor, you know, lowest acceptable yield. And they were less than half of that minimum, three to four parts per million. This sounded already crazy, so it looked very good in our report. Next year we had 68 farmers and they averaged over 8 tons again. And third year we still had farmers over 8 tons average, some as high as 10, 12 and 14. One was 16, using the same methods for measuring yield as the government used in its yield trials and reports. So at that point I figured I had to started learning French so I could read the priest's papers and also agronomy so I could try to explain to my colleagues at Cornell what. So I want to correct your earlier statement, John. I did not develop this. This is something I never would have dreamed of developing because I'm a social scientist, not an agronomist. But Father Henri de lanier had spent 30 plus years working with farmers in Madagascar, trying to figure out how to enable them on very small plots with very poor soils. They had adequate rainfall if it came at the right time, but they really were desperately poor. And he developed these set of methods that are, as I say, most of them counterintuitive, which greatly increased the yield and to put it in very critical terms, but they're not uncommon terms anymore. From a given genotype or variety, given genetic potential, we got plants which were much more desirable, more productive, more rust phenotypes, phenomena. These are the actual organisms. You and I are both phenotypes. We started from one genotype, but over the course of our life we were exposed to various kinds of influences and we develop into the phenotype that we are. Well, the plants that grew at SRI were usually two to three times more killers. Root growth is two to three to four times greater. They stayed green longer and didn't start dying back and senescing midway through the season. They were more upright, so they intercepted more sun. As I say, they gave higher yields. They were more resistant to pests and diseases, didn't blow over in the storms very easily. They could withstand water, stress and even drought conditions. So really quite phenomenal. And I was a political scientist by training, so for me it was all a matter of learning what's going on and trying to get scientists who knew more about agronomy and soils than I did to take a look at this. Unfortunately, the International Rice Research Institute was, we went to and asked them to work with us to evaluate this. Never picked this up. They were Pretty well satisfied that making genetic improvements would suffice to meet the needs of small farmers and big ones, of course, as well. As it turned out, these methods lower farmers costs, less inputs, more robust in the face of environmental and climate change pressures. We've even discovered, since we're doing an article on this, based on three published scientific articles, showing that when you use these alternative methods, you get more copper, zinc, manganese, iron in the grains of rice. So the plant takes more of these micronutrients and concentrates more of them in the grains themselves. So it's really quite a remarkable thing. And maybe the other remarkable thing is that these same ideas and methods, if suitably adapted for other crops, give similar kinds of yield increases and similar hardiness to resist climate change stresses. So it's been really quite a 20 year adventure. Took me 3 years to accept this. As I said, I guess in 97 I tranny cited was for real. And took us another 5 years to get up to trying to get these methods on 15 countries. Now we can say we have reports with good evidence that you get a better phenotype from rice, at least with these methods. We're over 60 countries where we're able to show that there are these benefits. We can talk a little bit more about this since most of your listeners, I guess, are from the U.S. we've gotten a few things started in the U.S. but for the most part American farmers, they know they're in trouble because of farm costs and climate stress and so forth. But the idea that something which was developed for really small, really poor farmers in Madagascar, helping them with their 500,000 or more acres, hasn't really gotten through yet. And of course we have to also talk about how these ideas or these principles can be applied with the mechanization. But thanks to a colleague, a large and very smart and progressive farmer in Pakistan, we can now describe directions these ideas can be taken for large scale production. I better stop. I can go on like this. That's background for you.

Thank you for sharing that background and for the correction on the source and how this develops. It seems to me the yields improvement and all the quality improvement, the climate resilience, the data, the numbers that you quoted, an average of 4x yield increase or higher, those would be really powerful motivator and a really powerful incentive to reconsider our farming practices and think about what we might be able to improve. So certainly I think the listeners of this podcast are growers who are very innovative and who desire to do a better job. So I'm Very hopeful that we can gain some traction here, I think. So you've given us the description and background of sri, and you've alluded to the methods. I guess the obvious question is, what are these methods? What is the system of root intensification? How does it really work?

Well, this is assembled very empirically, very inductively, experimentally. Father Launier came to Madagascar in 1961 with no prior experience with rice. He'd growing up in a large wheat farm in southern France, gone to the best ag school in France before World War II, but decided as the war was getting started. He really wanted to serve humanity rather than train himself to go back to the farm of his family. So he went to Jesuit seminary from 1941-45, and then he got sent to Madagascar in 61. Initially, he tried to introduce other crops which have higher nutrient content than rice, which is mostly good for its calories. But it turned out that Madagascar farmers just weren't interested in the vegetables of broccoli, carrots, etc. They needed to get their rice yields up, because Malagasy generally eat three meals of rice a day, maybe a few vegetables, or once in a while, some meat with them. And so what he finally decided, I got to tackle the problem at his base work on rice. And he found a few farmers who were planting just single rice seedlings in a hill, rather than 3, 4, 5, 6 seedlings in a clump, which is what farmers do almost every country in the world, because if you put a single seedling, it looks pretty puny and pretty meager. So farmers put half a dozen in, and they figure maybe the insects or something gets few of them. There should be something there. It's kind of an insurance policy. But it turns out if you plant plants close together, the roots inhibit each other. We know you don't plant tomato plants in a clump, you don't plant any plants in a clump. But for some reason, we thought that rice will do better in a clump. And it certainly makes the transplanted field look better because it's got more green in it instead of just mud. But in fact, rice plants, if put in the soil all close together, they don't grow the same kind of root systems. Deep and broad and long lived. He found some other farmers who were growing their rice without pulling the fields continuously, which is sort of the ideal most part of our sink fried. For aerated rice, you want a couple inches on the surface, and if a little is good, more is better. So they like to have 4, 5, 6 inches of water standing in the field. It looks beautiful because it reflects the sky and nice blue color and silver, not just muddy brown. But when you flood the fields, you suffocate the roots. You cut them off from their air supply and so they start degrading after a couple weeks. And so they get really truncated root systems, especially if they're growing in close proximity. And so just simply taking. They cut the plant population way down and cut your water way down. Just those two changes already gave better rice crops. Father Lane invented the next practice. Farmers were planting their ice plants helter skelter, which is the common way the ag scientists have been trying to get them to plant in rows so they could use a mechanical weeder that you'd push up and down the rows to uproot the weeds and burn the soil. It's kind of green manure. And Father Lanny thought, what happens if I plant in a square pattern and then I use this weeder in perpendicular directions at 90 degrees? He just tried it. And no farmer in his right mind would ever think of this, because if you're doing single seedlings and wide spacing, you're cutting your plant population by 80 to 90%. And that was really a stupid way, stupid thing to do. We all think more is better, so you plant more seeds. When you get more seedlings, the higher yield you should get. It's not true, but it sort of seems that way. And so anyway, he developed this method of weeding with this soil aerating weeder because it churns up the soil and gets more oxygen in the top layers. And that's very good for the roots to grow better, but it's also good for the soil organisms to grow better. The bacteria and the fungi, which are beneficial, the nematodes and protozoa which cycle nitrogen, eventually you get the earthworms, which will make the soil sort of macro aerated because you get pore space. We're doing in SRI is really managing the plants and the soil and the water and the nutrients in different ways to get synergy among the practices, which we have good evidence on, but also so that you're really growing larger, deeper, longer live root systems, and you're increasing the abundance of life in the soil as well as activity and diversity. The sort of capstone in a practice was when almost by accident discovered in 1983, 84, that if you start with very young seedlings, only 10, 11, 12 days old, instead of two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks, which farmers like to do because they're bigger, healthier, seedlings when you transplant it, and the field looks not quite so bare naked as it does when you put single seedlings in by themselves. He found out that if you transplant 15, they seedlings are younger, you get more growth of roots, more growth of tillers, even better grain weight. And that I could go into, if you want to ask me. It's a story which is sort of separate, but it gives a scientific basis for why using very young seedlings is preferable. Many people who are horticulturists will know that. Again, when you're going to plant vegetable seedlings, you don't want to get them very mature before you set them into the soil because there's less vigor. When I go to the farmer's market, I have to tell myself not to buy that biggest and most handsome tomato set, but rather take a pretty young one and take a little longer for it to mature, but I'll get much better yield from it. So anyway, he synthesized these practices and that was what he called sri. And then when the government took the subsidy off chemical fertilizers in the late 80s, he switched to compost because the farmers he worked with could not afford to buy fertilizer at a higher price. And it turned out if you do these other five things, then with compost, you get even higher yield than with chemical fertilizer. And so that was kind of the last step. And again, we have very good evidence on this, even published in Erie proceedings back in 2002, but ignored. So the different practices say the effect is to get more tiller growth or root growth, the root growth being really critical, but then also by increasing the soil organisms from the microbes to the macro fauna, the earthworms and mites and columbula and so forth. It turns out the same things of wider spacing, lower plant population, providing enough water for the plant and its needs, and also the soil iota and their needs, but not too much, not enough to create hypoxic conditions in the soil. So the soil is mostly aerobic most of the time, getting more organic matter into the soil to feed both the soil organisms and the plant. These practices together give you a very different phenotype. And I wish we had visual capacities to go with a podcast. Just see the difference in the plant growth. I've been given a panicle of rice in Sri Lanka, which is just huge. Of grain. And if you get 100 grain on a head of rice, that's okay. 200 is pretty good. 300, you're really excited. 400, you're ecstatic. This is 930 grains.

Wow.

One head of rice. And you know, I counted them. And in Indonesia a couple years ago, my wife and I were brought a big wooden box with oh no, we don't want to take any more gifts back. So the States were already fully packed and it was a stump of rice grown from one single seed that had 223 tillers or stalk, all from that one single seed. It's a huge clump and with huge mass of roots on it as well. I couldn't bring it back to the States because of phytosanitary regulations, but I got a picture of it, I fell in my hands and gave it to my Indonesian colleague to keep for us. The potential in the rice genome is really incredible. But we also see wonderful potential in other plants like mustard plants that are as tall as I am, over six feet and with two to three times more yield when you start with a tiny young seedling. And so all that's broken up so the roots can grow vigorously, not in compacted soil, given organic matter to nurture the life in the soil and to feed the plant as well.

Armin, you've put out so many valuable thoughts, so I want to go back first of all to your comment on photos. We can certainly share photos and to all of the listeners, I was listening as you were describing the method of one of the elements of sri. The list that I came up with from listening to, you were speaking about plant spacing, doing a much broader spacing, using less water and not flooding and saturating the fields for extended periods, and then the capacity to weed and aerate the soil with mechanical cultivation using very young seedlings and then using compost applications instead of chemical fertilizers. There's a few of those that I'd like to dive into a bit deeper. We work with many, in addition to broadacre crops, we work with many vegetable growers. And I've observed the same thing. They described that using young seedlings within a few weeks of transplanting and growing them in optimal conditions and taking them straight to the field, invariably we get much better establishment, less transplant shock, and much more productive and high yielding plants. Can you describe some of what you've observed and how that occurs?

Well, again, the first thing is that this summer Father Launay discovered that Madagascar farmers were treating the roots of the seedlings very badly, almost brutalizing them. They let their seedlings grow to be six, even seven weeks old in the nursery, and then when they took them out from the nursery, the roots were so long they got in the way. So they take the machetes and cut them off, cut them back. And so they're putting these plants which had been amputated and the roots into standing water 3, 4, 5 inches deep, which suffocates them. And that's what's called transplant shock, where it takes 10 to 14 days for the plants to resume their growth after they've been brought to the nursery into the field. Also, what he discovered was that if you take the seedling and you push it down into the mud, the tip of the root will invert upwards. So the root shape is a bit like a J. And what we say is that you want to put the roots in carefully so they're at least horizontal. It would be nice if they're clearly vertical like an I, but at least horizontal like an L instead of a J. So they can begin their. Or they can resume their growth practically immediately. We've seen this happen. So treating the roots really carefully, understanding how important they are, is a key element. Why do the roots grow so much better with young seedlings that have been carefully handled? There's a bit of agronomic knowledge developed in Japan that's not widely known, which applies to all of the Graminae, or grass family species. That's why millet and maize and wheat and other plants have similar effects when these methods are used. Dr. Katayama In Japan, the 1920s and 30s, studied wheat, rice and barley in laboratory and test plots and so forth, trying to understand the tillering process. And he came up with the idea, which is called Filacron follow for plantcron for time. And that's a periodicity in the emergence of tillers and matching that in the emergence of roots growing downward and sort of balancing the growth of the tillers upward. And I don't know how many of the listeners will know about Fibonacci series if they've read Dan Brown's book the Da Vinci Code, and they know about that, where each number in a successive period is equal to the sum of the previous two periods. So it's like 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc. 1 and 1 is 2, 1 and 2 is 3, 2 and 3 is 5, 5 and 3 is 8, et cetera. It turns out that in the first period of the rice plant's emergence, it'll put up one main stalk tiller and the main root going downward. Then it has two periods which there is no more tillering or root growth. And then the fourth period puts out a first primary And a root, and then the next one, another primary and a root, but then the one after that, you get third primary, but a first secondary from the first primary. And our roots are matching this. And so you get this 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, et cetera pattern. If all the growing conditions are optimal. And the seven principles for accelerating this periodicity include, first of all, temperature, warmer temperatures, I say speed of the biological clock. Colder temperatures slow down the biological clock. If there's good sunshine insulation, that speeds up the clock. Shading slows it down. If the soil is well spotted nutrients, the clock speeds up. If it's nutrient deficient, the clock slows down. If plants are close together, they slow down the clock. The wide spacing, the root growth and the tillering all accelerates. If there's enough water, but not too much, it'll be faster growth. Either too little or too much water slows it down. So anyway, something's interesting. I can get material on this. This is kind of periodicity in rice and wheat and also in finger melo. We've been able to show that. So timing does make an effect on the gene expression. Spacing has an effect on gene expression having enough water but not too much. That also helps to speed up the biological clock, as I like to call it, and you get faster growth. These are things that any farmer already knows, at least intuitively. But Katayama's work, which was done before World War II and then never published until after World War II and then published only in Japanese. And so far I found two, three different sources in English about it, but there's been no translation in English, which is a great loss. Farmers who grow wheat know about filicrons more than farmers who grow rice. In Australia, the forage farmers or cattlemen who raise forage know about filicrons. But some of the rice sector never quite picked up this discovery of Katayama. And so now that my father, Lalonier, had discovered that younger plants are better, and then he discovered the work of a Kataman, I expect he's a eureka. Now I know why younger plants do better. And when I got back to Cornell, one of my horticulture friends says, oh, we've known that for years in tomato sets, you know, younger and they'll grow better. There are surely many facts, including phytohormone production under certain conditions. But again, I'm not an ag scientist myself, and so I can't give as good an explanation probably as someone else could.

Norman, I do want to talk a bit more about some other Crops and commercial applications also. But one, one more thing that I think is important to unwrap a bit is the increased effectiveness of compost versus commercial fertilizer. Why is compost more effective at producing plant these types of yields? Why does it have this contributing effect that is a bigger effect than commercial fertilizers?

We've had a number of studies which show that for many crops or many situations, you may want to combine inorganic and organic to get some optimum combination. And so SRI is not against inorganic fertilizer, but if you're doing all these other things and as the soil becomes more fertile over time, which, as with SRI practices, it becomes uneconomic to keep using inorganic fertilizer. We had two baccalaureate theses done on this back in 2000, 2001, with very large operations. Students don't know how much work this kind of research can be, so they agree to it and they do it. One student had 286 +2/2/2 by 2 1/2 square meters, random block design testing six variables at sea level and sandy soils on the west coast of Madagascar, very poor soils. The next year, another one did his trials up at about 1000 meters elevation up from the plateau, good soils, temperate climate instead of tropical climate. And we got the same pattern of response. And one of the treatments was either recommended inorganic fertilizer applications or compost. And it was interesting that the yield results for all the different combinations we did factorial trials replicated. The yield combinations still were better with chemical fertilizer versus compost when you use one, two or three of the SR packages. But if you use the whole package or set of SR packages, the compost plots have yielded the chemical fertilizer plots, which we say is the indication of the synergy among the practices. Using compost isn't just for the plants themselves, but it's also for the soil organisms, many of which, and this may not be that well known to your listeners, live actually inside the plants as endophytes, symbiotic endophytes. In the last five to 10 years, we've become very conscious of how organisms inhabit our bodies, on, around or within our bodies, and greatly improve our health and vitality. We call it human microbiome. Well, plants also have plant microbiomes, both fungi and microbes that enter through the roots somehow or through cracks in the roots. And they live both in the roots and then in the stems and up into the leaves. It's quite remarkable. We now know that the microbes living inside the plant affect the plant's expression of its genetic potential. And I've worked with colleagues in China and Malaysia who've done the trials on this. I helped them write it up, but I couldn't begin to do the work myself, where we really got a good documentation that microbes which affect the gene expression. And to answer your first question, how do we get these different phenotypes? Its spacing, its timing, it's enough suffocating the roots with water, but it's also nurturing the plant microbiome, which will make the plants perform better. I can refer to three different pieces of research from China that helped me understand this fellow named Feng Shi, who's now in California. He couldn't find the good ag microbiology position in China, but he was doing studies of rice plants of the same variety. He started with the same variety for all his trials, but he published this article in the Journal of Applied Microbiology, Environmental and Applied Microbiology. And he took six sets of pots, got soil that he homogenized and sterilized and put the same soil in all six sets of pots. He kept one set of pots, you know, just so I would know inoculation or no microbial amendments. Then he took five different strains of Rhizobium and put the different strains in each of the five sets of plots, planted the same aged seedlings and all the pots together, and then analyzed them. And it turned out that the inoculated pots, which had this Rhizobium in them and which Rhizobium actually they showed with microscopic pictures, enter the roots and then go up into the plant and inhabit the various plant organs above ground. All five of the inoculated sets of plants had significantly higher root growth, significantly greater biomass above ground, higher levels of chlorophyll in the leaves, higher rates of photosynthesis in the leaves, a higher ratio of carbohydrates fixed from CO2 in relation to the water transpired, so the plant was more efficient at producing photosynthate from a given amount of water and then higher, significantly higher yields. And that was the first thing. And then he sent it to me, and I think I said, eureka. Then five years later, he published another article as a postdoc in which he had taken the best of the five rhizobia and cynorhavium melalote. 1021 is the specific organism. And he did what's called proteomic analysis, where they're able to identify the synthesis of different proteins in the roots or in the shoots or in the leaves, and could identify 20 or 30 proteins that were significantly more abundant or less abundant, where they either had a 50% increase or 50% decrease. And this was evidence that the genes that synthesized those proteins were either up regulated or down regulated. That was published in the journal on Qualporteomics, which is exciting. And then his mentor in China at the Institute of Botany in the China Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and he and I got acquainted and he asked me to help them write up some research that they hadn't been able to get published. And this was even more elaborate, more in the sense they were doing transcriptomic analysis where you're looking at the messenger RNA which comes from the DNA and then triggers the plant's destruction of particular proteins. And this is fascinating because they looked at the plants. In one set of plants, they inoculated with dead bacteria, and the other they inoculated with the live bacteria, which then inhabited the interior of the plants. And this article, published in a very good journal, I can't remember the name right now, show that one day after inoculation of the second set of plants, you had the upregulation, significant upregulation of about 100 different genes that they can, thanks to very modern technology, they can actually identify which gene is upregulated and also even by how much. And then the third day, there's over 1,000 genes that have been upregulated. By the fifth day, it's maybe 1,000. By the eighth day, it's maybe 800. The thing was that they had already shown in their experiments that when they inoculated plants, they had a growth spurt between days three and eight. And so some things were going on that you could see at the plant level. But at the molecular biology level, they could also see which genes are being up and down regulated. Things that, for instance, would affect the strength of the cell wall, that would affect the rate of cell division, cell elongation, and so forth. So it was showing that in fact, microbes living inside the plants are affecting how the plants express their genetic potential. Do it. Back to your opening observation. I found that rather interesting. Now, when I look at a plant that's doing well, I say, I wonder what the microorganisms inside are doing to guide, accelerate the genetic activity.

I recently interviewed Dr. James White from Rutgers University on the impact of endophytes and rhizophagy and the aspect that you're describing, that you're pointing out when we look at Dr. Meiwal Ho's work on the fluidity of genetics and horizontal gene Transfer between organisms and living plants, then ultimately, what you're describing, really, I mean, when you think about the rice plant that you described, where they typically have 100 seeds, or 100 grains per head of rice to 930 grains, that's completely different genetic expression. That plant, I'm certain, looks visually very different from the plant that only has 100 seeds per head.

Right. The root systems will also look very different. And we have evidence that microbes exude phytohormones that will affect the growth of roots. And so inoculating plant roots with certain beneficial organisms will give you more roots, longer roots, more diameter of roots, more surface area, et cetera. And the reason microbes do this, if I can impute a reason to it, is that the roots are themselves exuding carbohydrates, amino acids, various organic acids into the rhizosphere, the soil area right around the root, which then is food for the microbes. The microbes give the plants phosphorus, they give nitrogen, and they mineralize various micronutrients. And in return for that, I don't know where it starts. It's a chicken egg proposition. But the plants are feeding their microbes. 20 to 30% of the photosynthe from the leaves. Let's have rice will be transferred down. So there's a symbiosis, we used to think, just at the root surface. Now I know there's actually going on inside the plants in endophytic ways. So that the closeness between plants and microbes, the interdependence of plants and microbes, is really quite marvelous. And we've known very little about it in the past. Farmers would say, this soil is really good. What they didn't see was the organisms in the soil that were making the soil more fertile and the plants that grew on them more vigorous, more rapid, growing, more hardy. But that symbiosis between plants and organisms, microorganisms, has been going on pretty close to 500 million years. We have fossil record back about 460 million years showing arbuscular mycorrhizae in the roots of plants. When they first started evolving on land, they came out of the ocean and became terrestrial. And so the symbiosis between plants and microorganisms goes back a long, long time. As I said, if the plants didn't get back as much or more than they gave up, I don't think we could have had a plant world and really, ultimately a biotic world at all like what we have now.

It would not be a symbiotic and co supportive relationship? Absolutely no. So when you, at the very beginning of our conversation, you mentioned that the development of this method of SRI also resulted. One of the benefits was increased nutritional content, which is a topic that person very passionate about because of the implications for public health and the necessity of producing more nutritious food for the growing world population. What were the impacts on increased nutrient content from using and adopting this method?

Well, this is still laboratory work or field trial work. It's not been. First of all, we never had any resources to work with, to evaluate out of this. And most of our efforts have gone into just understanding and communicating as interracial. Farmers could try it for themselves. If it works fine, they can have it. There are no limitations on it. But three different researchers who I had known before, but I didn't know they were doing this research until they sent me drafts and said, can I help polish the presentation? They are looking at controls where they use conventional methods, older seedlings, close planting, flooding and all that, compared to the SRI methods, which is young seedlings, wide spacing, organic matter and no flooding. And then they would assay the nutrients in the plants and then in the grains itself. And they had 30 to even 60% increases in iron, copper, zinc and manganese. And one of the three studies, sulfur as well, just as a natural process. In the first study they looked at cyanobacteria, which is a soil organism which was clearly involved in solubilizing micronutrients and then facilitating the uptake of the plant. And the plant in turn then would concentrate those micronutrients in the grain more. So we'd have more nutritious grain to consume for human beings, but you'd have more and better. It's not choosing between quantity and quality. These methods give both more quantity and better quality. They also give a better straw or better fodder for the animal consumption. So that's another sort of benefit that can be traced to this. When we first did some trials at ICARSAT in India, the International Crop Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics, one of the CGIR systems, I remember talking to one of their fodder specialists who said, you know, the cattle prefer it, the straw from the SRI rice, and they had better weight gain from it. Well, that surprised me because one thing we had figured out about SRI is that when you're not flooding the soil continuously, there is more uptake of silicon or there can be. And then there is sri. Plants are less prone to lodging, being blown over by wind. One of the first Things I learned from a farmer, Sri Lanka, who wasn't really complaining, but he was explaining to me and other farmers that he couldn't any longer wear short pants in the rice paddy. He said if he's growing new varieties with fertilizer, everything. He liked to walk through his rice field with short pants and feel the leaves rubbing softly against his legs. He said if he walks through an SRI plot, he gets leaf cuts on his legs and so he has to wear long pants when he goes into an SRI field. That was just sort of a curiosity at first, but now we understand that the rice plants are also taking up more silicon, which means they have tougher leaves, tougher stalks, stronger roots and so forth.

And I'm sure the higher silicon levels and the higher levels of zinc and manganese and copper and iron all contribute to increased disease resistance as well, Right?

Exactly. The chilling insects have less free reign on these plants. There's a nice little story in getting this introduced in India. I talked to the Secretary of Agriculture in Andhra Pradesh state and offered to arrange for local accommodations, cover local costs if he could send two of his professional staff to India to see SRI for themselves. And one of the persons he asked was this very, you know, I think wonderful, but sort of crusty agronomist, actually a plant breeder. He was a farm boy himself and very dedicated to farmers needs. He'd won an international prize for working on combining rice with black Graham and it had been a very great success because he was such an energetic person. The secretary asked him to take this 10 day trip to Sri Lanka. And he was a plant breeder and had worked more on Graham than on rice. He said, oh, no, thank you. And when the secretary asked him a second time, he made another excuse and he told me. But when I was asked a third time, I had to say yes, because you can't tell your boss no three times. So he came and the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, who was a friend of mine, had agreed to host the these two scientists. And Sachin Raya said, in my first two days I saw lots of really beautiful rice. But it didn't really quite impress me all that much that I started changing my mind the third day. They went in the evening home to Khamini's house to have a good rice and curry dinner. And they took the bus from the city out to the suburban location, which is pretty rural. And they got off the bus and started walking up this path to Khamenei's house. And it was a drowsy year and the rice Fields on both sides of the path are sort of brown and didn't look very good. And he saw this green field at the head of the or the end of the path, which was Gamanese, because he's a civil servant and the agronomists wouldn't accept his expertise since he didn't have an agronomy degree. He planted himself to get his own results and be able to talk from experience. We had this beautiful green field when all the other fields were suffering under the grassroots. I got up at the field and Satchin and I pull up a head of rice from domini's field and one from neighbor's field, and there's 125 grains on the neighbor's head of rice and 510 ongones, a fourfold increase. And he said, even that didn't break through my. He didn't use the word arrogance, but I think he was implying it. He said, but I pulled a leaf out of Gomese field and was running it through my finger like I've done hundreds, maybe thousands of times before. And I looked at my thumb and he said, I cut my thumb on the leaf and it was bleeding a little bit. And he said that persuaded me. He said, I've never cut my finger from a blade or leaf of rice before because it's usually very tender and soft. And that incidence has also told me silicon is going to be functioning differently in SRI plants. So that's not genetics, that's just good, straightforward agronomy. Although I'm sure there's some role of microorganisms in the soil that will be supporting, facilitating, maybe accelerating the uptake of silicon. But silicon is one of the most underestimated elements in plant performance. You probably know that from other sources there are lots and lots of elements that have come together thanks to Father Laumier's work in this system. Some are pure agronomy, some are microbiology, some may be still other things. But it's a combination both of changes in genetic expression and other things that just aren't easily explainable by our usual kinds of agronomic science.

I think silicon is very important and not appreciated enough. And one of the things that we have observed in our extensive testing with SAP analysis is that it is actually correlated with microbial activity. The better we have in the soil profile, the better silicon absorption we have. So that would correlate perfectly with what you're describing. Obviously, this system of SRI and this method of thinking about growing plants, I believe is applicable to many different types of crops, reducing plant stress and increasing climate resilience. These are all goals that we would desire for many different types of crops. What are some of those crops that it is most applicable to that it produces the biggest crop responses on?

Well, the first one this is done by farmers with their NGO assistance in India was finger millet, which is a major crop in both South Asia and in many parts of Africa. Its big advantage is it's drought resistant, like more than most other crops, and so you can grow with very small amounts of water. And it has the very same kind of response to young seedlings, wider spacing soil organic matter that rice does. And so we've got number of places in India where it's actually spreading quite well. So I can say we're quite confident about. Then farmers started doing this with wheat. And we found that one of the reasons why you get the big benefit in irrigated rice is that you're stopping the suffocation of roots by continuous flooding. But all the other parts of SRI applied to wheat, leaving the flooding aside, still work the wider spacing young seedlings and so forth. Although in wheat farmers have often found that direct seeding now can be done if you can get enough water at the time of germination to get a good growth response. We often will in direct seeding put two seeds for a hill in figuring maybe one will get taken by a critter or one germinate. But the same set of principles. Sugarcane is now one of the most successful adaptations in India and we've had it taken to Kenya and Tanzania. And we're working right now trying to get into Cuba where they only have 40 ton per hectare yields. Well, those are pretty poor and our Indian colleagues say we should be able at least to double that without more cost just using the input. Similar to rice mustard, which is not a monocotyledon like the grain family, also had very good response with mustard teff in Ethiopia. The grain of Ethiopian farmers has responded very well. The yields there have gone compared with their broadcasting traditional method, up to fiverr, which is 1 ton per hectare can go up to 5, 6, even 7 tons per hectare. If you transplant young seedlings about 20 x 20 cm, the seed is about 20 days because it's a little different growth rate for teff compared to rice. But that works very well. And when I've been in India in Bihar, I remember visiting a large vegetable field at women farmers had used SRA methods to raise their okra production and they were very pleased with that and with themselves for that we have an organic farmer colleague up in Maine who does it for virtually all of his crops now, and especially carrots. He's had tremendously successful response using ideas with carrots and, and he's even applied it to his orchard, apple orchard. In terms of spacing, soil management, working on timing of pruning and so forth. He's taking it well beyond where Father Lowney had. But he knows his horticulture and very experimental and he gets tremendously good results improving his orchard production. There are probably some others too, but sunflower even has been used with these ideas in Pakistan.

I'm sure the idea is when you think about developing optimal plant expression, the ideas, as you indicated, in some cases they may seem counterintuitive, particularly plant spacing, but yet when you begin really studying plant physiology and what's happening and what's going on inside the plant, they start making a lot of sense. I do want to ask you about developing or applying these methods to larger scale production agriculture. But actually before we go there.

I.

Would like some clarification on the planting spacing. You mentioned what you're doing, how the changes have been made with rice. What were the prior plant populations, what was the plant population shift before and after?

Well, it's probably easier to say. In terms of seed rates, 7,500kg of seed per hectare was the normal, but up to 150, 200kg if you're doing sort of broadcasting, which is very wasteful of seed, we bring it down to about 7.5 to 5 kilograms per hectare. So it's about a 90% reduction in the populations. Trying to give you number of plants, I usually think in terms of seed rates.

That'S a really significant reduction. And that's of course part of what allows these plants to express themselves is because they're not competing with each other and they have full access to sunlight.

It turns out if you have 3, 4, 5, 6 in a hill, there's a lot of shading of each other's leaves, which really reduces the photosynthesis. One colleague in India has done very careful work on this and has talked about different plant architecture. So some of the tillers go more horizontal, but then up vertically and so they present a much better surface for the sunlight to be intercepted. He shows about a 15 to 20% increase in light interception with these fewer plants. 16 plants per square meter instead of 60, 70, 80, 100 plants which would be there otherwise.

And it's all about sunlight interception and solar collection using that energy.

That's one of the elements again I should stress it's not any one thing. Each one of them has some justification, some benefit. But when you put better roots together with more light interception, you get more photosynthesis. So if you simply did one of these, you get a benefit, but you wouldn't see it. And these practices, because they are somewhat counterintuitive, are ones that probably no farmer would ever think of doing. I really respect farmer knowledge and experimentation, but farmers growing rice have been doing some pretty unproductive things for centuries, even millennia. It looks better and safer if you have 100 plants per square meter instead of 10. But in fact, 10 can proliferate below and above ground in ways that give you more tillers per square meter and then also more yield per not flooding the field if you have enough water. Seems like a pretty crazy idea. I know I'm going to have water stress. I'll just keep water on and keep as long as I can, not knowing that if you flood the field the first month or two, you're going to stunt, even degenerate your roots. So then when the water stress comes in the third or the fourth month, the plant really is set up to fail. And when we work with farmers, we try to get them to follow the growth of their roots. We'd much rather have them do a combination of traditional methods or their own methods and SRI than go all to SRI at once, because they won't have the learning of pulling up different plants and frying root size and root color. The fact is that if SRI plants have good water management, they don't turn black and brown. The tillers at the base of the plant, if you're flooding, they'll get dark, even black, up 3, 4, 5 inches. You can tell if there's been good water control by whether the stalks tillers stay green all the way down to the base of the plant. So getting people to do something which is different from what they and their forefathers and foremothers have done, it's not an easy process. And the social scientist in me tries, but hasn't been very successful at fully encompassing our understanding of what we're seeing or dealing with. I think we've now got more confidence in the, the plant and microbial side of things than the human side of things.

The human side is your area of expertise and not mine. But it's an area that I'm very intrigued with for certain.

I'm telling you that the social science I learned from my master's and PhD hasn't been getting me very far.

I've Made the comment many times that changing agriculture doesn't happen in the field, it happens between the ears.

That's good. Yes. And I also, there's a hyphen there agriculture because it's really got a huge element of culture, and not just culture for the plants, but for the people and their beliefs and desires and their symbols and so forth.

How do we adapt these ideas and these practices to large scale commercial production agriculture?

That's a good question. I think I have a fairly good answer though. We wish others would sort of join in and do the further testing and development. This was developed, as I intimated before by Father Launier working with Riddy small farmers. Often it's a fraction of an acre and they have to get all the production they can get from that little bit of land. And because their population density is so great, they often only get that piece of land every third year or fourth year. They have very complicated inheritance systems to share the rights to cultivated fields. So our focus really has been on those who have the very least our lowest resource endowments and helping them to get more benefit from their available resources. And we just say don't necessarily go to zero external inputs, but we like to make farmers as independent of outside resources possible. The farmers we work with don't have money anyway. We don't like them to go into debt. So we're trying to do a sort of endogenous process somehow. A fairly large, fairly rich, quite successful farmer in Punjab province of Pakistan learned about SRI and on his own just started adapting it to his large holdings. He had about 500 acres as a side business because his main business was importing and selling farm machinery. Ford, Fiat, Massey Ferguson, etc. And for 30 years he was really a very progressive businessman and sideline farmer. He was the first farmer in Pakistan to do laser leveling of his fields because that would help him save water in a very dry, water scarce part of Pakistan. And so somehow he found our website, which I hope your readers will consult. There's more there than they can probably ever use, but it's all there. And so he wanted to take up SRI in Punjab. But the two problems there is that water is scarce and secondly, labor is scarce. There's huge population in the country, but agricultural labor is pretty much all the able bodied laborers have gone off to Lahore or Karachi or someplace. So agricultural labor is sort of left to the infirm or the older women. Labor is a problem for Asif. And so because he's in machinery sales, he has his own big A machine workshop. How he could fabricate and adapt equipment for SRI as he understood it. And this is just something from reading about it. I mean, he's really quite bright. And he said he's a really good foreman in his shop. You describe what you need and the foreman comes back two days later. And so it's all there to try out in the field anyway. What he did was take a 44 acre field is this test plot. Now that's a big test plot. He had laser leveled it so it was perfectly flat. And he developed the first machine which made raised beds mechanically. So he used furrow irrigation. And so he has this machine that goes back and forth and just converts the whole field into raised beds 45 inches wide with sort of a 9 inch furrow on either side of the bed, which you run your irrigation water along. And because he wants to save energy, he laid it out in a way that he could use a siphon to draw water from the main canal and send it down his furrows so he has no energy costs for that. His second machine is kind of a Rube Goldberg machine, tacking three different functions together. It's, I won't say a tractor. It's a machine that drives down these raised beds. It can be designed so that, in fact you don't need a driver because you put little baffles on the front that touch the edges of the furrow and it will correct the machine's movement. So you just run it up and down these furrows. It has seats for two laborers to sit in this machine and they drop 10 day old seedlings into the holes. The machine is punched as it goes down this furrow at 9 inch distance in both directions. Punch, punch, punch, punch. The laborers have these 10 day seedlings in sort of like mats, looks like carpet. They've rolled up and they drop one seedling in each hole as the machine goes slowly down the row. And then there's a. It's got a supply of both chemical fertilizer and compost. It cuts those application rates by 90%, but it injects these right in the holes where the plants are put. So they are, you know, very efficient uptake of those. You. He's working toward fully organic. But this field has been heavily chemicalized in the past. So he doesn't just go cold turkey and go fully to organic in one season. And he has a big tank of water on the machine, a bowser. And after the fertilizer put in the hole and the plant's been dropped in, the hole is filled up. It's about a 6 inch hole and it's filled up with water and then that water slowly seeps into the soil, which is dry soil. You know, planting seedlings in the dry soil in the sun drenched conditions blows the mind. But then when they've got the whole field with seedlings dropped in the holes and that I kept these moist, he, he floods the whole 44 acres to 1 inch above the ponds or the raised beds. Because it's laser level, you can get really precise application and that all seeps into the soil. He doesn't ever cover up the roots, but when you put that first water in, it sort of stirs the soil enough so that you get a little quitting of soil and the plant starts growing. And he doesn't do any flood irrigation after that first application of water.

He.

Does furrow irrigation every four or five days. And the nice thing is if you use his machines which packed on the soil in the furrows, that then makes the furrows fairly impermeable on the bottom and the water will then diffuse laterally into the raised beds on either side. That's pretty good. Then he has a weeder he's built which goes up and down these rows every 10 or 12 days. These can also be radio controlled without a driver because you could have the baffles on the front of the machine that track the sides of the raised beds. And because the precision planting is so exact, you can get a really good weeding in between the rows which are each nine inches apart. He gets five rows on a bed and he doesn't do any cross weeding because that would destroy the raised beds. But by doing a good thorough job between the rows, he gets good results. His yields, which would normally be 4 to 5 tons, were average 12 tons per hectare. With 70% less labor and 70% less water. That's pretty staggering.

Wow.

And the price for rice is not that good in Pakistan presently. So he's diversified to wheat, melons, tomatoes, chilies, sunflower. He's doing a lot of crop rotation, which is also about conservation agriculture. I should say that after he discovered sri, he also discovered conservation agriculture, which has the three principles of minimum soil disturbance, continuous organic cover of the soil and then rotation of crops to get more diversity out of crops. So much but of soil biota because each plant has different kinds of exudation and it'll help keep a lot of microbial diversity in the soil. So anyway, Asif has put SRI and concentration agriculture together with organic agriculture. That's his triad for what he calls paradoxical agriculture. That paradoxical is because you get more, you deal with less inputs, which takes most people have a long time to accommodate. But anyway, if you can do 44 acres that way you can do 4400. I mean, it's a thoroughly mechanized operation and like the rotates crops and not just rice. And he's very glad to share all this information. He's a very generous person, environmentalist, who's trying to save water. And he sort of had an epiphany about 10, 11 years ago, realizing he'd been contributing to this mechanized chemicalized agriculture, which soil and just destroying its quality. So that's why he set out with a good source base to change the way that agriculture is done in this area. He's got hundreds and hundreds of farmers doing it now. And after trying for 10 years to get the government to pay attention, he says in the last year or so, the new government of Imran Khan has been indeed very interested and supportive. So he's embarking on a lot of training and doing a lot of lecturing.

Now that is all good news. Norman, where could people go to learn more? Where can they learn more about the work that you have done?

Well, we have a website maintained here at Cornell, which is. Cornell. Edu or if you go on Google and just put in system rise intensification, you most probably get our. Our webpage is the first one because it's the most trafficked of all of them. We're based in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences here at Cornell in their international programs. But I would say that our faculty here have been less than this than have been faculty in China and India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia. And so we have really a very large number of persons who have been doing scientific work on this and a lot of NGOs doing promotion for a variety of reasons. The WWF, Oxfam, America has been probably the most active bread for the world. World neighbors, World Vision, all have been using this in various other programs. And that's all reported on the website. We have country pages, so have information organized by country. We have literature page for journal articles, technical reports, lots of those. We have manuals in 17 different languages already where our colleagues have translated material and we post it on the Internet so anyone can have access to it. There are literally probably six or seven hundred videos now, many of them on YouTube, but other services as well. We have probably 500 slideshows, PowerPoint presentations.

Sounds like a very significant body of work. For certain.

This has been done mostly by my colleague Lucy Fisher over the last 20 years. She's just devoted huge amounts of time and effort and thought to making this a repository. It's available free to anyone. A book that I did on Sri in 2015, which has been translated into Chinese and Spanish and Burmese, is available up there free to anyone who wants to download it. We're trying to. It's like a land grant operation. Cornell is a land grant university and one of our tasks is to provide the best information we can to farmers and producers and consumers anywhere.

I think this is certainly information that needs to get out there, which is why I was very, very happy to have had you here on the podcast. In the course of the conversation, you mentioned a number of different peer reviewed published papers, Katayama's work in Japan and the Asian research that has been done on plant genomics and so forth. Are those on the website as well?

Oh yes. But probably the best way for that. The book I mentioned on SRI is organized in terms of frequently asked questions, facts, and the first 20 pages answers the 20 plus questions in a few paragraphs. That's the short, quick answer. And then backing up each of those is five to eight pages or longer answers and with references to the literature, with tables and illustrative pictures and so forth. So if you get that book, it's called System of Rice Intensification Responses to Frequently Asked Questions. That is probably the best single source.

So for all of our listeners, we will include links to the resources that Norman has mentioned in the show notes here in the podcast so you can find those directly and link through directly to those. Norman, it's been an absolute pleasure having you here on the podcast. I want to thank you for all the work that you have been doing and helping people around the world, for your contributions and for sharing your knowledge and information that you have learned over the years. So thank you very much for being here and I look forward to talking more in the future.

Well, there's nothing I enjoy talking about more than this, obviously, and we're still learning. It's a work progress. But you don't have to wait until you know everything before you share what's been allocated in the field and already starting to produce some benefits. I didn't mention that for irrigated farmers we reduce the greenhouse gas emissions per hectare by 20 to 30% because there's much less methane and there's not much offsetting nitrous oxide. And that's not even calling the carbon dioxide savings you can make if you're not using a lot of fertilizer. And other inputs. So it's not just helping farmers to adapt to the pressures of climate change, but also make a contribution to abating the global warming forces that are threatening our existence, to be very candid.

All right, that was wonderful.

Thank you for that talk. Anytime. My pleasure.

Thank you.

I wish everyone successful.

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