Tapping into NASA satellite tv for pc information, a brand new expertise helps farmers in Bangladesh scale back water waste whereas irrigating rice crops — an effort that might finally mitigate the water and vitality footprint of the nation’s large-scale rice manufacturing.
The newest model of the Built-in Rice Advisory System (IRAS), a collaboration between the College of Washington and Bangladesh’s Ministry of Agriculture, makes use of information from NASA’s Earth-observing Landsat satellite tv for pc to estimate the quantity of water rice crops have consumed. Researchers can examine that information to how a lot water the crops really want, primarily based on weekly climate forecasts and by taking into consideration lately carried out native irrigations.
Easy, actionable steering is then despatched as SMS to farmers as soon as each two weeks about optimum methods to make use of groundwater pumping for his or her particular area.
Such a expertise “may help the world grow to be extra water-efficient and energy-efficient in rising meals, whereas additionally turning into extra reasonably priced and handy for farmers,” Faisal Hossain, a professor of civil and environmental engineering on the College of Washington in Seattle who leads the IRAS effort, mentioned in a statement.
Bangladesh is at the moment the world’s third largest producer of rice, and farming is the primary occupation for practically half the nation’s workforce to feed its inhabitants of 170 million. Rice, nevertheless, can also be one of many thirstiest crops — farmers throughout the nation at the moment use 1.3 million irrigation pumps run by diesel to water them. However, solely about 1,400 of these pumps are solar-powered.
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Over time, intensive and unsustainable irrigation practices, like pumping extra water into the sector than strictly crucial, have decreased the nation’s groundwater ranges a lot that monsoon rains are actually insufficient to replenish the extracted underground water. Furthermore, working diesel pumps to channel water into fields is just not solely costly but additionally burns fuels that launch carbon dioxide into the ambiance.
Thus, applied sciences like IRAS can be helpful to preserve groundwater whereas serving to the nation scale back its carbon dioxide emissions, researchers say. “To create sustainable and climate-resilient agriculture for the long run, we have to reduce irrigation waste and de-carbonize the manufacturing through the use of reasonably priced options that may be scaled globally,” Hossain mentioned within the assertion.
His workforce, which has suggested 10 million farmers throughout Bangladesh as of June this yr, estimates IRAS has the potential to lower water waste in agriculture by 30% and scale back carbon emissions by 300,000 tons yearly.
Though earlier variations of the system have been in use in Pakistan since 2016 — the place the expertise was first deployed — and in India since 2018, researchers say the most recent iteration has been tailor-made to focus on Bangladeshi areas recognized for wasteful irrigation processes.
Between January and Might in 2021, which marks the annual season for the boro rice selection, roughly 10,000 textual content messages had been despatched to farmers in seven districts in northeastern Bangladesh. An evaluation report printed in 2022 notes that farmers who acquired these messages irrigated 9 occasions lower than normal, whereas pump house owners, who management water provide to the paddy fields, reported irrigating 16 occasions much less in comparison with earlier years. The pump house owners additionally reported their income decreased by 15%, probably attributable to decrease demand from farmers.
The report doesn’t state precisely how a lot complete carbon emissions had been lowered from these seven districts as a direct results of lesser-than-usual irrigation. However, the expertise has confirmed to have tangible advantages.
Previous to its official launch in Bangladesh in 2021, a prototype of IRAS was examined amongst 165 farmers in 2019. The system proved notably helpful when the Bulbul cyclone struck the nation in November 2019, damaging practically 200,000 hectares (494,200 acres) of crop land, together with rice fields, throughout three full days. Bulbul marked one of many longest and most damaging cyclones the nation has needed to face in over 50 years — and local weather change, exacerbated by human-driven carbon emissions throughout the globe, continues to see an uptick in these storms’ severity.
Throughout such occasions, rainfalls and flash floods come unexpectedly, so data about how rather more water crops want, if in any respect, was useful to 78% of the farmers, the examine notes.
Regardless of the venture’s current progress in reaching 10 million farmers nationwide, the SMS-based supply of data comes with a “non-negligible operational price for cellphone texting,” which for Bangladesh is being accommodated within the restricted funds of the nation’s authorities. The ceiling on these funds might hinder the expertise’s potential, as practically half of Bangladesh’s 170 million inhabitants remains unconnected to a cellular community.
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