Introduction of floating gardening in the north-eastern wetlands of Bangladesh for nutritional security and sustainable livelihood

Abstract

Floating gardening is a form of hydroponics or soil-less culture. It is an age-old practice of crop cultivation in the floodplains of southern Bangladesh, where aquatic plants such as water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) are used to construct floating platforms on which seedlings are raised and vegetables and other crops cultivated in the rainy season. The platform residue is used in the preparation of beds for winter vegetable gardening. Floating gardening was introduced in 2006 on a pilot-scale in the north-east wetlands of the country, as a contribution to food security and as a supplementary income for the marginalized community. The overall experience of floating cultivation in three selected villages was encouraging. Local people became aware of this new farming system and their level of knowledge improved. Communities were mobilized into groups to make floating platforms, and platform residues were later used to establish winter gardens. Cultivation was successful on both types of plot, and vegetables were both consumed by the producers and sold in the market. The input–output analysis revealed floating gardening to be a feasible alternative livelihood option for the wetland dwellers. The method provided targeted landless people with parcels of land in the monsoon, enabling them to grow vegetables. Floating gardening and associated winter gardening appear to have the potential for introduction to other parts of the world where aquatic weed management is a major problem.

Increasing productivity and improving livelihoods in aquatic agricultural systems: a review of interventions

“…The construction of floating gardens is a productivity intervention which has the potential to harness stagnant floodwater to culture vegetables (e.g., ginger, cowpea, eggplant, snake gourd) under hydroponic conditions. Large floating beds are constructed using aquatic flora, typically the prolific weed water hyacinth (Irfanullah et al 2008;Ullah et al 2009;Irfanullah et al 2011). Vegetable seedlings are subsequently transplanted from the homestead production system to the floating bed as monsoon floodwaters rise (Irfanullah et al 2008).…”

Assessing of Farmers’ Opinion towards Floating Agriculture as a Means of Cleaner Production: A Case of Barisal District, Bangladesh

“…The main floating agriculture practicing districts of Bangladesh are Barisal [18,42], Gopalganj [18,48,49] and Pirojpur [17,50]. Although, this technique were transferred to other flood prone areas of Bangladesh either extensively or some extent, like, Madaripur [39,45], Satkhira [17], Habiganj [51], Kishoreganj [19,52], Gaibandha [38,53], Khulna [54][55], Sunamganj [19,51,56], Netrokona [51,57], Faridpur [58], Lalmonirhat [59], and Jessore [40,[60][61]. At these regions, different types of monsoon and winter crops are grown.…”

“…People who are practicing floating-bed cultivation are enjoying a better life economically, than those in other flood-affected areas who have not yet adopted this practice [21]. Through another study, Irfanullah et al [22] confirmed that floating cultivation practice helps to supplement people's income, which contributes towards the alleviation of poverty, and provides greater food security by increasing the landholding capacity of poor as well as landless people by allowing them to grow vegetables and crops with lower input costs, mainly due to the minimal infrastructure requirement. However, Chowdhury and Moore [23] chalked out the gap of field-based investigation as future research.…”

Cost-benefit Analysis of Seedling Production on Floating Beds in a Few Selected Areas of Bangladesh

“…Both natural and artificial floating beds are used (John et al, 2009) for agriculture in many tropical wetlands of the world. Water hyacinth is the major ingredient of soilless cultivation (Irfanullah et al, 2008) to make floating bed locally known as dhap. Farmers make the bed as their desired size and shape.…”