The world’s southernmost rice farms innovate against climate change
In Chilean fields, techniques are beginning to be adopted to reduce water consumption in crops by more than 50% and to grow in extreme weather conditions
Rice grows in abundance in the dry soil of a field in Ñiquén, a municipality in the Ñuble region 400 kilometers (249 miles) from Santiago, Chile. The completely atypical cultivation method has begun to attract farmers to this field in the Las Rosas sector to witness that it is possible to produce one of the most consumed foods in the world without high water usage.
Guillermo Muñoz, 66, who began farming in the fields as a child, had never seen anything like it. “If you don’t see it, you don’t believe it,” he says. This rice, the southernmost in the world, is not a miracle of nature, but of a group of researchers from the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and the Chilean National Institute for Agricultural Research (INIA) who are carrying out genetic modifications to make the Oryza sativa plant, the Asian rice plant, more resilient to climate change and less polluting.
What they have achieved is production with half the water resources normally used. That is, they have decreased water use from 23,000 to 12,000 cubic meters per hectare, on average, per season. But they are also seeking to achieve a reduction in methane emissions into the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide and of which rice fields are responsible for 10% of global emissions, according to data from the World Bank.
This is being studied at an INIA Quilamapu experimental station in the municipality of San Carlos de Ñuble, where swampy paths lead to plantations, which are distinguished by their various shades of green. Fernando Barrera, a rural extension specialist at IICA, explains that here, emissions from the traditional farming system are measured compared to other production systems without flooding, and thus it is possible to determine how much of these gases can be reduced. These efforts to measure and adapt low-emission production systems have also been applied in Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay, Panama, and Argentina.
The challenge: more rice, less pollution
While removing a few weeds from a rice field on dry soil, Guillermo Muñoz says that rice plantations have been declining in Chile due to displacement by more economically profitable plantations, such as fruit trees, and even due to the lack of labor in the country.
Barrera confirms a decrease in production in recent years in Chile. The South American country is not a large producer of rice, with only about 20 hectares concentrated between the regions of Maule and Ñuble, and it mostly imports this crop from Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay, to supply almost half of the national demand, which is between 150,000 and 200,000 tons annually.
Chilean crops are dominated by a genetic line called japonica, which is usually used for preparing sushi or baby food and is only produced in 10% or 15% of the world. It is not the most consumed variety globally but one of many, but for researchers it is important to scale up its production and to do so without extreme weather conditions being a condition.
All-weather resistant
A more resilient rice is an idea that has been brewing for decades in the country. But it was the mega-drought that Chile has experienced over the past 15 years that provided the impetus to develop solutions for rice production as of 2017. Researchers not only sought to make it resistant to dry weather conditions, but also to cold. “With climate change, there is the possibility of not having any water, or having too much of it,” says agricultural engineer Karla Cordero, who has led the INIA genetic rice improvement program since 2006.
Almost everywhere in the world there is a variety called dry or upland rice, which is fed only by rain and is resistant to drought. According to Cordero, this type of rice has a low yield, especially in Asia, since it produces less than three tons. “More than that is needed to feed the world without continuing to damage the environment,” says the agronomist, known in Chile as the “queen of rice” for her multiple investigations and developments in the sector over the past 20 years. Cordero believes that the Asian continent, where the largest amount of this crop is produced, must leave its “comfort zone” and try other formulas for diversification: “We know that monoculture is the road to failure and loss.”
Historically, rice has been developed that is drought tolerant. “It is extreme, because the plant has almost no water, and that is a thing of the past because we do not need drought, but rather water, transformation, and the ability to produce,” she says. To obtain a versatile crop, they adapted the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) — mainly used in Asia and other places under transplantation with little technology — to the soil and climate conditions of Chile. Of almost 300 genotypes of different varieties evaluated over almost a decade, four have been selected for their ability to adapt to both droughts and floods. “This is revolutionary, since in many countries they are still not thinking about planting varieties of this type,” says Cordero.
The intention is that this Chilean formula for adapting the SRI will be used on a large scale in the future.
The result is aerobic rice; that is, rice grown in soils that are neither flooded nor saturated and well-drained. For researchers, this is an alternative for mitigation and they are working to generate more scientific evidence of this, with the intention of making it a proposal for adaptation to climate change for other countries.
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