On-Farm Wheat Trials in Bangladesh: A Study to Reduce Perceived Constraints to Yield in Traditional Wheat Areas and Southern Lands That Remain Fallow During the Dry Season

Abstract

22H . M . R AW S O N et al. was only 1.5 million t and decreasing. The situation was creating serious concerns for food security and diminishing foreign currency reserves.There are two standard approaches to increasing production: first to look for unused or under-utilized land that might be adapted to wheat cultivation and second to explore ways to increase yield per unit area in current wheat cropping areas. In the second approach yield is increased by reducing perceived environmental and genetic limitations.The paper presents the research activities designed to address the two approaches and meet the original request for assistance. At the outset basic requirements had to be fulfilled. Local crops researchers, agricultural extension workers and farmers had to commit to the project and be actively involved throughout. This would ensure that the project would build on best regional and local agricultural knowledge and avoid naïve suggestions that might have been tested previously and failed, or might otherwise be inappropriate. Researchers from the Wheat Research Centre (WRC) of the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) in association with the Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE), together with individuals of CIMMYT Bangladesh provided this network of expertise. Agricultural experts from other countries acted as consultants.Of interest to the study was land in southern Bangladesh that normally remains fallow during the dry season, so is potentially available to wheat. Constraints of high temperatures, salinity and available season length of less than 100 days had been commonly thought to preclude economic returns for wheat in that region. Further, water for irrigation is very limited thus making alternative crops like dry-season rice impractical. Could wheat be grown by working around the constraints in some way? Fallow land is estimated at more than 400 000 ha in southern Bangladesh. This land grows rice during the several months of the wet season during which time it remains largely submerged by monsoon waters.The primary requirement was to identify the main constraints to high yield in both the southern and traditional wheat lands, and then to ask farmers to test a range of methods on their farms to minimize those constraints. CIMMYT Bangladesh and WRC researchers had already concluded from many field trials in the traditional wheat growing areas of Bangladesh that the success of a rice-wheat rotation depended on meeting the optimum planting and harvesting dates for both the rice and the wheat (rice was usually transplanted aman, T. aman, grown during the wet season). The optimum planting date for wheat in the region had been estimated as the end of November (Ortiz-Monasterio et al., 1994). Despite this knowledge, wheat was commonly planted too late, so constraining vegetative growth and pushing the grain-filling phase into the very high temperatures of late March; because of the consequent short season and rapid maturity of the crop, yields were low and uneconomic. Sometimes wheat could ...

Forgoing the fallow in Bangladesh's stress-prone coastal deltaic environments: Effect of sowing date, nitrogen, and genotype on wheat yield in farmers’ fields

“…Trials spanned eight different production environments chosen with varying levels of soil salinity in coastal southwest Bangladesh. Our objectives were to confirm earlier on-farm study results (e.g., Carberry et al, 2011;Rawson et al, 2007), indicating that wheat can be used to achieve system intensification objectives in this stress-prone region, and to help establish efficient recommendations for N management as a function of sowing date and genotype in saline-affected deltaic environments that are common in Bangladesh, but which may also have applicability in similar environments such as in West Bengal, in India.…”

“…Research in less-favorable environments -for example those located in coastal and deltaic areas with environmental stresses -is less frequent, as is work conducted in farmers' fields, where bio-physical and socio-economic diversity typically necessitates site-specific management strategies (e.g., Erenstein et al, 2008;Rawson et al, 2007). In southern Bangladesh, we assessed management options for farmers cultivating wheat for the first time on formerly fallow land.…”

“…Two potential pathways for SI in this region include (i) increasing yield on currently intensively cultivated lands ('crop intensification') using better-bet agronomy, stress-tolerant crop genotypes, and resource conserving management practices, and (ii) by encouraging farmers to move from single into double cropping on seasonally fallowed lands (i.e. 'system intensification') where only monsoon 'aman' season rice is currently grown, also using the above approaches (Rawson et al, 2007). Double cropping on currently under-utilized lands could substantially benefit smallholder farmers and make considerable contributions to regional food security objectives, though there is uncertainty about what management options are most appropriate in these environments.…”

Can Bangladesh produce enough cereals to meet future demand?

“…The simulated maize Yp in this study is lower than those reported by Timsina et al, 2010 , Timsina et al, 2011 , the simulated Yp of rice is similar. Likewise, the simulated Yp for wheat across the country is slightly lower than that recorded from well-managed trials from large numbers of fields ( Rawson et al, 2011 ) as well as also lower than those reported by Timsina and Humphreys (2006) . The discrepancies in simulated and observed yields for rice are expected as the Yp for boro rice in this study was averaged for eight locations of Bangladesh using observed weather data while the Yp from Timsina et al, 2010 , Timsina et al, 2011 was based on only three locations and simulated using the NASA weather data.…”

Study on Agronomically and Economically Dominant Cropping Patterns in Some Selected Areas of Barisal District

“…The land growth is still occurring (Rawson et al, 2006). During the Kharif season, they are cropped with T. Aman or T. Aus rice, irrigated by the fresh waters of the monsoon, but in the Rabi season, the salt rises as the land dries and crusts are formed on the surface, making it unsuitable for productive cropping.…”