Carbon project brings new rice farming technique to India

Quantum Commodity Intelligence - A freshly filed carbon project is seeking to bring sustainable rice farming practices to India and boost the livelihood of small farmers in the world's largest exporter, its proponents told Quantum in an interview.

AgriCapita Innotech, a sister company of Indian consultancy EcoCapita, is close to filing registration papers with US-based standard Verra for its Sustainable Paddy Program (VCS 3655).

It is among the first projects in the country that propose to manage emissions of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, from paddy fields using alternate wetting (AWD) and direct seeding (DSR) techniques, using CDM methodology AMS-III.AU.

The project is set to expand from a trial of 6,000 hectares to 50,000 hectares by March 2023 with the enrollment of 50,000 farmers and several thousand more in the final stages of discussion, said AgriCapita.

Over the next few years, Sustainable Paddy could expand to 1 million hectares, or around 2% of India's total cultivated area.

The technology is well developed in China, with more than 150 projects in the process of registering or already registered with the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS), but not so in India, Atul Singh, Managing Director, EcoCapita, told Quantum.

Only six other Indian projects have applied for VCS verification to date and none have yet achieved registration.

VCS 3655 will reduce the water level in the rice field at least once before flowering and ideally multiple times, thus limiting methane emissions and reducing overall water use.

Working with farmers

Parts of India are increasingly subject to drought as climate change accelerates and farmers will need to adapt by using less water.

"In China, where farming is done on a bigger scale, there is not much of sustainability aspect except water management. In India, people cultivate small plots of land which are very important for their livelihoods," said Singh.

"For this project, we have to work with 100,000 farmers... it's huge. We will also apply full safety norms for the first time in India. It's a first step to educate the farmers to use less water and less pesticide."

AgriCapita has developed an Android app that farmers can use to take pictures of the fields at key times, thus proving that they have used alternate wetting, which is more demanding and more costly.

It is currently working on adding a direct seeding module to the app, said Sahil Wali, who manages carbon credit sales for EcoCapita.

"We will be able to assist our farmers with other sustainability programmes in the coming years," said Wali.

"Our vision is to provide holistic services to the farmers while working on sustainable practice aspects. We will be hiring agronomists. The farmers will have a direct line to our agronomists through dedicated call centres. This will help them with a support system for all their issues, including managing diseases," he added.

VCS 3655 intends to distribute the rewards of carbon credit sales to farmers via subsidised pesticides and free farming assistance services rather than direct cash transfers, which it views as less sustainable.

AgriCapita plans to use drones to spray pesticides onto the crops, which reduces the need for manual labour and farmers' exposure to chemicals.

The pesticides will use international quality benchmarks such as Maximum Residue Levels (MRLs), thus boosting the quality of the crop and the price at which it can be sold on the market, it said.

Rice is grown all year round in southern India but only during the summer in the country's north. India is the world's second-largest producer and largest exporter.

Traditionally, rice is grown with constant flooding techniques using an elaborate irrigation network built over hundreds of years.