Effects of puddling on percolation and rice yields in rainfed lowland paddy cultivation: Case study in Khammouane province, central Laos

Abstract

We investigated the effects of puddling on percolation and rice yields in rainfed lowland paddy cultivation. We selected a study village in Khammouane province, central Laos, and set up non-puddling and puddling plots from high to low positions. Even when puddling was conducted carefully, the ponding water in the plots disappeared in the case of little rainfall. Further, percolations during the later periods of rice growth increased drastically. Therefore, it is difficult to overcome drought stresses only by conducting puddling. We also compared the water conditions in the non-puddling and puddling plots. In the puddling plots at high position and low position along a stream, the number of days without ponding water in the puddling plots was less than that in the non-puddling field in July, suggesting the possibility of a different transplanting date. We tried to estimate the effects of transplanting date on the rice yields and found that transplanting 15 days earlier leads to an increase of 0.5 t/ha in the rice yields. Moreover, the profits from the increased yields exceed the puddling costs considerably, leading to a definite increase in income. Because the transplanting date has no effects in the fields with high ground water, puddling is effective in paddy fields where ponding does not occur to a significant degree.

Plasticity in nodal root elongation through the hardpan triggered by rewatering during soil moisture fluctuation stress in rice

“…In contrast, we have been paying special attention to water stress due to soil moisture fluctuations (SMF) 3 , 4 . Since RFL is dependent on the availability of rainfall, SMF, which is the recurrence of transiently anaerobic (flooded) to aerobic (mild drought) conditions and vice versa, is a common water stress condition 5 – 8 . The phenomenon of phenotypic plasticity, defined as the ability of a genotype to change its phenotype in response to changing environmental conditions 9 , has been emphasized as an important crop adaptation strategy to mitigate the effect of stress; thus, maintain productivity 10 , 11 .…”

Estimation of potential recharge through direct seeded and transplanted rice fields in semi-arid regions of Punjab using HYDRUS-1D

“…Deep percolation was estimated using soil water balance equation and it was 1139.4 mm and 1305.6 mm in transplanted and direct-seeded rice, respectively, as shown in Table 4. About 14.6% more deep percolation was estimated in case of DSR as compared to TPR due to higher infiltration rate in non-puddled and porous root zone soil in case of DSR (Yadav et al 2011;Fujihara et al 2013). The total measured water input from TPR and DSR was 2035.5 mm and 1935.5 mm respectively.…”

Artificial groundwater recharge through rice (Oryza sativa L.) cultivation: A systematic review

“…Groundwater is explored by test drilling, electrical resistivity, electric and gamma ray logging. Net Ground Water Availability & Ground Water Draft (March 2013) [25] found that annual ground water replenished is 6.84 BCM. Artificial Recharge to Ground Water (AR) detailed 4312 check dams, 7181 sub-surface dykes, 10780 gully plugs and 10780 nalah bunds as AR structures with 4650 km 2 area with 1078 MCM (million cubic meter) recharged water (Michael, 1978) [45] .…”

“…Percolation rate of soil is governed more by the water passage ways it contains (root channels or structural cleavage) than by the character or volume of the pore space (Slateob and Byers, 1931;Bouma, 1978) [11] . Fujihara et al (2013) and Yamada (2010) [69] reported that the ponding water in the plots disappeared even when puddling was conducted carefully during little rainfall and percolations increased during the later periods of rice growth. Absence of drought stress was found by higher rice yield of non-puddled fields than puddled ones.…”

“…A literature review with the objective of identifying the ideas and aspects associated where focused to identify patterns and differences in adoption and application of these ideas. This in turn might benefit future work as every attempt to realize the significance is indispensable (Pretty, 1999;Giovanucci et al, 2012;Matson et al, 1997;Shi et al, 2005;Tilman et al, 2002) [50,44,25,65] . Irrigation can mitigate salinization and water logging, in irrigated areas (Zhou et al, 2016;Emna et al, 2016;Singh, 2017a, b).…”