Finding a workable solution for Crop-Burning

[Prakat]

Size really matters. Anything to do with India, agriculture, and sustainability requires solutions deployed at scale. It also requires a systems approach.   Take stubble burning, for instance. Harvesting machines have unleashed this deleterious practice on Indian farms—the largest exporter of rice in the world—which no amount of tinkering has managed to fix.    This year, agritech startup nurture.farm, along with a management school and an agricultural institute, attempted an intervention that seems to work. But what has worked on 420,000 acres, or less than 7-8% of the affected area in just two states, will have to be expanded multiple times over to register any wholesale impact.    While the company may claim that this is 150X the size of any such intervention till date, the beauty and the challenge lie not just in scaling the effort, but sustaining the business of stopping stubble burning.    For now, a look at what happened this year.

CRM as SaaS   The seasonal stubble burning visuals from north India are already sliding into memory. The National Capital Region’s (NCR) air quality index is also improving to “poor quality”. But before the annual hot-button issue diffuses into foggy December and the year-end slack, let’s dwell on some good news.   It was mechanised farming that led to mass stubble burning in the first place. Large harvesting machines left stalks that were several inches tall and required much longer to decompose in the field. Lighting a match did the trick. In the process, it gutted air quality and soil health. Indian farmers burn some 92 million tonnes of stubble every year.

But last week, a crop residue management (CRM) report from agritech startup nurture.farm’s pilot showed that mechanised farming, new bio-decomposers, digital data collection, app-based services, satellite monitoring, and field force training can make a significant dent.   Of the 420,000 acres worked by some 25,000 farmers that the project serviced in Punjab and Haryana, the two most affected states, the startup claims 92% of farms did not burn crop residue. In Punjab, only 3% of the farmland serviced by the project burned stubble this year, while 68% of these farms had resorted to the practice in 2020.   In Haryana, this number came down to 14% in 2021 from 86% in 2020. In this state, says the startup, it had consciously chosen districts with the highest reported burn rates—such as Karnal, Kaithal, Sirsa, and Hisar. The agritech’s data comes courtesy of European satellites.    Meanwhile, a news report on Sunday said that a separate satellite monitoring project by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), whose bio-decomposer nurture.farm has used, shows that stubble burning in the two states was down by 7.6%. However, a third such project by the New Delhi-based Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), which uses Nasa’s satellite data, says it was up 8.4%.    Eventually the satellite data will reconcile, and we’ll know how the farms fared overall. What is indisputable though, once again, is that Punjab and Haryana accounted for a very high number of fires.    In Punjab alone, approximately 22 million tonnes (Mt) of CO2, 0.92 Mt of CO, and 0.03 Mt of SO2 are generated from burning around 15 Mt of rice residue on an annual basis.   Dhruv Sawhney, chief operating officer (COO) of nurture.farm, says that servicing 420,000 acres is significant in terms of operational scale, but it still covers less than 7-8% of the overall farm acreage that is burned each year in the two states. Dubbing it as Phase 1, he says that in subsequent phases, they will scale up to service at least 100,000 farmers and cover 2 million acres.    That’s ambitious given that this time, it was a free service to the farmers, with the barely-two-year-old nurture.farm bearing the cost at Rs 1,000 (~US$13) per acre.

Ash to cash   Several solutions to stubble burning have been proposed in the past—including using machines to plough crop residue back into the soil, or harvesting the straw for use as boiler fuel. But nothing has been tried at scale.

“A farmer has to choose between spending more than ₹6,500 per hectare for in-situ straw management or a matchstick.   The problem of paddy stubble was created by machines. And a machine-led solution to it has failed to solve the problem, said Balwinder Sidhu, member-secretary at the Punjab Farmer’s Commission. “Instead, it is only benefitting manufacturers who have raised the prices (of crop management machines) to corner government subsidies. Why stubble burning is so hard to fix, Livemint

But if economics pushed the farmers into this burning practice, better economics could likely pull them out of it.    Sawhney furnishes an attractive 20-20 finding. In this pilot, apparently, farmers saw a 20% increase in additional income via short-duration crops and yield improvements.    Earlier, the farmers had to wait. First, for the crop stubble to dry so they could be burnt; then for the soil’s health to recover for the next crop. But with the bio-decomposer, which is mixed with water to make a solution, spraying happens immediately after harvest. The next crop can be sown just eight days after this, since the decomposition is already underway and the bio-enzymes only affect dead biomass. Many farmers were seen to be planting short-duration crops in the interim, says Sawhney.    These were typically the farmers who had planted medium- to short-duration paddy in late June and early July. So they had the chance to grow another round of short-duration crops like green coriander, cabbage, cauliflower, and others with a duration of 30-90 days.   Secondly, Sawhney claims there’s a ~20% reduction in fertiliser usage and costs for the next cropping season.    Now, this may be a little presumptuous. Because this is the first season of large-scale bio-enzyme spraying, and one doesn’t yet know how soil health will change over the coming months.    Sawhney says that previously, the farmers had to revive their farm’s microbial activity and nutrient quotient by using fertilisers in the post-burning phase. But with the bio-decomposer, friendly farm flora and fauna are not killed. And the decomposed stubble pushes carbon and other nutrients back into the soil, acting as manure.    “As per our on-ground feedback from farmers, they say they are saving up to a quarter of their earlier fertiliser consumption,” he says. “We will be putting up more validations based on soil samples and field surveillance over the next few months.”   This is the first time that a startup has tried to address stubble burning at scale. But Indian agritech is replete with innovations that don’t go beyond the pilot stage. This is especially true of recent times, when most agricultural universities have seen their field extension programmes peter out.   That Sawhney and team have roped in Indian Institute of Management-Rohtak and IARI in this pilot, and are publicly sharing their findings, is a welcome step. (Their Phase 1 impact report, slickly produced and full of in-house branding, is a good starting point for anyone wanting to dig deep or follow up.)    Adding more farms and farmers to the service platform may not be as simple as adding more sellers on an e-commerce site, or Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) to a grocery delivery business. But if the agritech startup is drilling down to the root cause of the problem, it might not be impossible either.    Sawhney says they are now in a strong position to “engage with post-harvest market linkage players to determine how to create a premium for sustainably produced crops and commodities”. It appears the company is also launching a “sustainably grown rice” label for people who wish to buy rice from farms that do not burn stubble.    The company wouldn’t disclose service-bundling or pricing details for the next phase, nor how it would fund the nearly 5X scale-up in acreage. However, it has surely piqued the interests of many. Because Indian agriculture and the environment need solutions at both speed and scale.   source: https://the-ken.com/greenmargins/dont-burn-it-cash-it/