Cornell professor Norman T. Uphoff is leading a Food Revolution That Starts With Rice:
Harvests typically double, he says, if farmers plant early, give seedlings more room to grow and stop flooding fields. That cuts water and seed costs while promoting root and leaf growth.
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Dr. Uphoff grew up on a Wisconsin farm milking cows and doing chores. In 1966, he graduated from Princeton with a master’s degree in public affairs and in 1970 from the University of California, Berkeley, with a doctorate in political science.At Cornell, he threw himself into rural development, irrigation management and credit programs for small farmers in the developing world.
In 1990, a secret philanthropist (eventually revealed to be Charles F. Feeney, a Cornell alumnus who made billions in duty-free shops) gave the university $15 million to start a program on world hunger. Dr. Uphoff was the institute’s director for 15 years.
The directorship took him in late 1993 to Madagascar. Slash-and-burn rice farming was destroying the rain forest, and Dr. Uphoff sought alternatives.
He heard that a French Jesuit priest, Father Henri de Laulanié, had developed a high-yield rice cultivation method on Madagascar that he called the System of Rice Intensification.
Dr. Uphoff was skeptical. Rice farmers there typically harvested two tons per hectare (an area 100 by 100 meters, or 2.47 acres). The group claimed 5 to 15 tons.
“I remember thinking, ‘Do they think they can scam me?’ ” Dr. Uphoff recalled. “I told them, ‘Don’t talk 10 or 15 tons. No one at Cornell will believe it. Let’s shoot for three or four.’ ”
Dr. Uphoff oversaw field trials for three years, and the farmers averaged eight tons per hectare. Impressed, he featured S.R.I. on the cover of his institute’s annual reports for 1996 and 1997.
Dr. Uphoff never met the priest, who died in 1995. But the success prompted him to scrutinize the method and its origins.
One clear advantage was root vigor. The priest, during a drought, had noticed that rice plants and especially roots seemed much stronger. That led to the goal of keeping fields damp but not flooded, which improved soil aeration and root growth.
Moreover, wide spacing let individual plants soak up more sunlight and send out more tillers — the shoots that branch to the side. Plants would send out upwards of 100 tillers. And each tiller, instead of bearing the usual 100 or so grains, would puff up with 200 to 500 grains.
One drawback was weeds. The halt to flooding let invaders take root, and that called for more weeding. A simple solution was a rotating, hand-pushed hoe, which also aided soil aeration and crop production.
But that meant more labor, at least at first. It seemed that as farmers gained skill, and yields rose, the overall system became labor saving compared with usual methods.
Dr. Uphoff knew the no-frills approach went against the culture of modern agribusiness but decided it was too good to ignore. In 1998, he began promoting it beyond Madagascar, traveling the world, “sticking my neck out,” as he put it.
Slowly, it caught on, but visibility brought critics.
The verdict isn’t in yet.