Sowing the seeds of resilience among smallholder farmers in Bangladesh

Tahera Begum, 47, faced ridicule from her neighbors and relatives when she decided to cultivate potatoes during the recent growing season using climate-smart strip-planting technology instead of the conventional approach, which involves heavy pulverization of the soil in four rounds of tilling before sowing. Though widely practiced, this method contributes to topsoil erosion and has comparatively higher costs, as well as increased fuel and labor requirements.

Along with her husband Asgar Ali and two children, Tahera lives in West Dhirashram, a small village in the Gazipur City Corporation, Bangladesh. Even her close relatives, also potato farmers, tried to persuade her to not risk her entire income from the coming season by adopting this technology.

Tahera herself was skeptical when she was contacted by the officials of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) to try the strip-planting method. But she set aside her qualms and those of other farmers because strip planting had a clear economic advantage: It would save her 7000 Taka ($65) in tillage costs for the season on her 0.3 acre plot.

Two months into the crop cycle, Tahera was all smiles as she looked out on her field, with lush green potato plants signifying the growing tubers underground.

“It was initially difficult for me to go against conventional wisdom and sow without tilling the entire field. But looking at my crop now, I expect to get better yield than earlier,” Tahera said, barely making an effort to hide her exuberance.

Tahera Begum is one of the four farmers in her village of mostly smallholder potato growers to adopt strip-planting technology—a type of precision planting that consists of tilling only a narrow strip of soil where the seeds are planted and leaving the remaining area untilled. A strip till machine is used to make loosened soil beds in which potatoes are sown—eliminating the four rounds of tillage of conventional potato cultivation. This not only produces significant savings in tillage cost but helps to increase yields.

^{Taslima Zahan}
Strip-planted potato field in Dhirashram, Gazipur District, Bangladesh.

This targeted tilling approach combines elements of both conventional tillage and no-till systems—offering several benefits to farmers. Adopting this climate-smart practice helps to preserve soil structure, reduce erosion by leaving most of the soil undisturbed, and helps to maintain soil aggregates, organic matter content, and soil moisture. Farmers get better control over seed placement and spacing, resulting in uniform crop growth and higher yields. In addition, strip planting also reduces weeds and has significant savings in time and cost.

However, the approach is not very popular among smallholder farmers in part due to its dependence on the strip planting machine, which costs around 80,000 to 100,000 taka ($740-$925) and requires a trained operator to guide it manually in small fields. To overcome this challenge, BARI researchers have started providing the machine at no cost to early adopters and have been experimenting with the custom hiring model—charging a small sum to a group of farmers for use of the machine—in several villages.

Tahera was introduced to strip-planting technology by Taslima Zahan, a Scientific Officer in the BARI headquarters in Gazipur. Zahan is part of the Consortium for Scaling-up Climate Smart Agriculture in South Asia (C-SUCSeS) project team in Bangladesh, a collaboration between IFPRI, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), SAARC Agriculture Centre (SAC), and SAARC Development Fund (SDF).

Zahan, along with her colleagues in BARI field offices across Bangladesh, led by the Chief Scientific Officer and National Focal Point of the C-SUCSeS project Md. Mazharul Anwar, are on a mission to nudge smallholder women farmers like Tahera to adopt climate-smart agriculture technologies as part of C-SUCSeS project.

Strip planting is just one of a number of climate-smart interventions that the C-SUCSeS team at BARI is now working to scale up. The team has prioritized several other interventions in different parts of Bangladesh based on the cropping patterns, agroecological needs, and socioeconomic conditions of the farmers in each region. Bed planting, another conservation agriculture technology, is being scaled upin various parts of Rajshahi District in northern Bangladesh to cultivate maize, wheat, and mustard. In Pabna District of central Bangladesh, Garlic farmers who predominate in one village have been trained to cultivate their crop using the zero till method during winters by utilizing rice residue from the kharif crop. Strip planting is also being promoted in other parts of Pabna to cultivate mustard, lentil, sesame, maize, and wheat.

The early adopters of these technologies express common fears of economic risk and that farming implements may be unavailable, BARI researchers say. Smallholder farmers dependent on harvests as their sole source of income are reluctant to experiment unless the risk is offset through incentives—input costs, in most cases. Thus, for the techniques to catch on, it’s critical to provide inputs or the required implements. But once the benefits (reduced cost, increased yields, better soil health) start becoming evident, program support becomes secondary, and farmers tend to adopt the technology even if it entails a marginal increase in the cost of cultivation.

For the potato growers of Gazipur, the incentive was the strip planting machine provided by BARI that prepared the field for sowing in six hours, instead of the usual seven to eight days. Tahera, reflecting on the benefits of strip planting including higher yield, increased moisture retention, and fewer weeds, observed: “I reckon there will not be any farmers in this village who will need persuasion from Dr. Taslima—most have already come to her field and pledged to adopt strip planting next season.”

Himanshu Pathak is a Program Manager with IFPRI's Development Strategies and Governance (DSG) Unit, based in New Delhi; Taslima Zahan is a Scientific Officer with the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI); Apurbo Chaki is a BARI Senior Scientific Officer; Mamata Pradhan is a DSG Research Coordinator based in New Delhi.

C-SUCSeS is a four-year joint initiative between the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Agriculture Centre (SAC), IFPRI, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and SAARC Development Fund. The project fosters partnership and cooperation between the National Agricultural Research and Extension Systems (NARES) of the SAARC member states and IFPRI on the Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) agenda.