In the last week of October, We finished transplanting gliricidia in the far northwest of Annapurna plot 373. This comes after good rainfall overnight that finally pushed the planting work in motion.
Here are a few images from the gliricidia plantation from the previous year, a part that has been shredded down for composting.
We started the paddy season this year on 28th August sowing the first seedbed. The season began with an all-season improved variety CO43 along with Bhavani to test its early seasonality. We started the field preparation in the dry month of September where unlike the last couple of years, there was no trace of summer showers.
As of today, we have finished transplanting varieties: CO43, Farmer’s select Annapurna, Test|Bhavani and Test|Uma (red) in 14.7 of 20 acres of paddy and the remaining fields are still being prepared to plant further with red rice variety – Poovan Samba.
We skipped sowing Poovan Samba (red rice) as a test direct sowing system last week as 2 large ponds are reduced to the minimum and we are left with 2 bore wells, a single rain harvesting reservoir at its half capacity. Which shifts our focus now on maintaining – mainly weeding what is transplanted yet slowly moving to prepare remaining fields as we observe light monsoon (still South-west) in the air.
Irrigated salad bars/green manure are relatively easy depending on the monsoon each year. At Annapurna, we receive an ample monsoon (summer and winter) and sometimes, even a cyclone at times. As a result, rain water harvest ponds have more capacity to sustain the rice, orchards, and fodder, because of which we sow early harvested paddy fields to raise an irrigated salad bar. Green manures such as Phaslous Tribola and Sesbania Speciosa, (dryland specials) establish robust overgrowing of the weeds under irrigated conditions.
The CO43 paddy harvested early in January and the Annapurna paddy fields stretching up to 7.7 of the total 20 acres, raised with early green manure and irrigated since the good monsoon last season, serve as a grazing ground for the dairy during the dry season. Cows spend an hour grazing in a rice plot and get daily rotated into another field. The idea is to irrigate the fields enough to establish the crop, graze the cattle swiftly, and allow green manure to bounce back up with the irregular summer showers to plow it back in for paddy preparation. The remaining paddy fields are grown and managed as the dryland salad bar for the dairy and green manure for the paddy. Productivity of these plots varies from year to year depending very much on the summer monsoon rains.
In an exact opposite scenario, we rely on the summer rain to germinate the green manure. In such instances, we look at rain predictions and then sow the green manure. Some years it rains several centimeters high, which can replicate the same result as when we rely on the irrigated system. This year, however, the rains were short and scattered.
This brings us the first heavy flush of weeds, predominantly the Trianthema decandra L, which is locally known as spinach and is edible for cattle in regulated quantities. Under the lush short canopies of this weed, we have our green manures germinated. It remains dormant without ample sun and moisture and waits for the weeds to wither out after its 45-day life cycle. This grown sea of this dominant weed also falls prey to caterpillars (moth species unidentified) and gets eaten away making way for the sunlight to reach the ground and the dormant green manure finally synthesizes back to life.
Today the cow herd is grazing lazily in one of the paddy fields which has green manure plants growing in it. Our 20 acres of paddy land is divided in over 100 plots which are bunded and leveled individually. We have around 40 fields with lush green manure growing in it right now. The rest of the fields are all composted, plowed and waiting for a good summer rain to be re-plowed and sown with green manure seeds.
We had a very long, drawn-out monsoon this year ending only mid January; that is a month longer than usual. On top of that we had a very good rain in the 3rd week of February. We also had some light showers in May and June.
Because of this we could establish a leguminous green manure crop on over 7 acres of the rice land.
We are reaping the benefits right now because the herd of cows have a wonderful area to graze on.
Our rice plots are around 500-700m2 and the animals graze for approx. 1 hour per day in a plot to fill themselves with rich fodder. Since they graze a short time only parts of the plants will be eaten and the crop will recover after a good rain. Like this the cows have rich fodder and we have a nice green manure in September/October which will be plowed in to feed the next rice crop.
We use a mix of Pillipisaru (Phaseolus triloba) and Sesbania speciosa for this purpose. These two kinds do well in our heavy black clay soil and the animals graze mainly on the former and leave most of the Sesbania plants.
