Half a world away from Des Moines, Iowa, where the World Food Prize “Borlaug Dialogue” International Symposium is being held this week, Bangladeshi farmers are hard at work sowing wheat and maize in their fields.
This year, however, something is different. For many farmers, new techniques supported by USAID are helping to reduce costs, achieve better yields, and earn higher profits. Something as simple as planting crops in raised beds or reducing tillage can have an outsized effect on crop yields and earnings.
Stamping out rural hunger and poverty in Bangladesh is not some distant dream. It is a real and attainable prospect, and with support from the U.S. Government’s global food security initiative, Feed the Future, we are doing our part.
To watch how the simple but powerful techniques we support are changing the lives of Bangladeshi farmers, check out the three embedded clips below on strip tillage, bed planting, and saving water and overcoming salinity. The longer version of the video (20 minutes)—”Save More, Grow More, Earn More“—is also well worth a view.
Strip Tillage
How do farmers produce a profitable crop with hardly any irrigation at all? Farmers in Bangladesh are showing the way by planting into mulch, and using simple machines that plow only a small line in their fields, into which seed and fertilizer are dropped at the same time. These easy-to-implement practices conserve precious soil moisture and improve their investment in fertilizer.
Bed Planting
Farmers across Bangladesh are putting the problem of high irrigation costs and water scarcity to bed—literally. Using the simple and effective technique of planting their rice, wheat, maize and legume crops on raised beds, farmers are getting more crop per drop and reducing irrigation requirements by up to 40 percent.
Overcoming Salinity with Conservation Agriculture
Despite increasing fuel and irrigation costs, as well as crop-damaging soil salinity, innovative farmers in Bangladesh are conserving soil moisture and overcoming salinity with conservation agriculture. By not fully plowing their fields, using appropriate machinery to sow their crops in lines under a layer of water-conserving mulch, and rotating between profitable crops, farmers are beating the odds to achieve profitable maize, wheat and legume yields.
I think it’s important for USAID and the World Food Programme with the United Nations to focus on food shortages in Asia. This is especially true for Bangladesh, who is prone to shortages because of their frequent flooding and rising prices of staple goods like rice.
Another area to focus on for encouraging food production is by protecting crop fields from flooding or providing aid for flooded fields.
This is the biggest reason for food shortages in Bangladesh and can be remedied by installing better drainage systems.
I’m glad to see that Bangladesh is starting to get more international attention, the food shortages there are incredible and are much more easily solved that those in Africa. It’s a shame more investment and charity work hasn’t been done in this region but I’m glad to see USaid is coming to the rescue.
Really Bangladeshi farmers are fighter when they get support. They have been hard working for food security. If they get technical support from others like USAID..they have to ready goodbye poverty.
This really a good step for USAID…and also in Bangladesh…I really love to see Bangladeshis new agricultural techniques.I am a Bangladeshi and I think we need more and more…like BD