Skip to main content

From Uttar Pradesh, India: Finding Sustainable Irrigation Solutions

Currently, the Northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh produces just enough food
for its population of 190 million. Poor irrigation methods and crop management are rapidly depleting the state’s water table. Most smallholder farmers cannot afford new wells and are looking for alternative methods to reduce their water consumption but still improve their livelihoods.

The goal of our project is to find mechanisms for improving agricultural production, increase farmer incomes, and foster sustainable agricultural practices through reduced water consumption and improved land management. We are seeking to match or enhance the expected performance while further reducing costs of irrigation systems that are currently marketed to smallholder farmers throughout the developing world. We hope to develop a model that can be used by development organizations to recommend the most appropriate systems for their client farmers.

In June, we traveled to Uttar Pradesh, India for field work. We are collaborating with Value Development Initiatives (VDI), a development company based in London, and Sarathi Development Foundation, a local NGO out of Lucknow.  We spent five days in two villages meeting with farmers, landowners and women’s groups discussing agricultural practices and determining the need for improved irrigation techniques.

We also met with numerous individuals at every level of the agricultural supply and policy chain. Our trip concluded with a visit to the iDE-India demonstration farm outside of New Delhi, and met with the Vice President of technical development.

We gained a strong understanding of agriculture in Uttar Pradesh and found a growing demand for improved irrigation systems by smallholder farmers. We are now planning to run an experiment looking at the different low-cost irrigation systems available in India.  The combined results from the fieldwork and experiment will help us make recommendations on products and practices appropriate for farmers in central Uttar Pradesh.

Curran Hughes, Graduate Student, International Agricultural Development
Jesse Dylan Keith, Graduate Student, Agricultural Resource Economics

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to the UC Davis Blum Center Blog!

Here you will find updates on our organization, and blog posts written by each of our Blum Fellows about their experiences abroad. Make sure to check out our website at blumcenter.ucdavis.edu, and like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/UCDavisBlumCenter to get regular updates and see our upcoming events.
Post a Comment
Read more

Manufacturing in Phnom Penh by Purva Juvekar

During winter and spring quarter 2017, my teammates and I (Team WASHOut) designed a sanitation station using a Biosand Filter. This was our effort towards providing clean water to students in floating schools on the Tonle Sap lake. We were provided with the opportunity to go to Cambodia and implement our project in person through the Blum grant, and we worked with Wetlands Work!, our clients for the senior design class. Figure 1 Rendering of Sanitation Station   We spent our time at UC Davis designing the station – sketches, CAD models, renderings, dimensions, engineering analysis and testing. We made a prototype in Davis, which we showed during the Senior Design Showcase in June, to test flow rates and water quality standards. The next step was to take the design to Phnom Penh and manufacture it there. We got to work as soon as we got there. My teammate and I were introduced to people on the WW! team who could help with translation, and we began scouting the city to fin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pedaling for Water in Kisumu: Closing, By Abe McKay

Pedaling for Water in Kisumu: Closing (3 of 3) 2017.09.12 In my second week in Kenya, I was back to visiting farmers, both with Vibrant Village and through other connections. However, I receive my biggest surprize in between site visits. I was walking with Ernest Kulali, a field officer and farmer from Vibrant Village, and he was telling me about the effectiveness of farming techniques. Using traditional methods, Ernest was getting 20kg of maize (corn) in a season from his shamba , his farm . When he switched to using purchased seeds and fertilizer, the same land produced 360 to 540kg of maize. What!? I had him run the numbers by me again, 20kgs → the range of 400kgs. I still didn’t believe it, but Nick the Vibrant Village director later agreed that farmers were seeing that magnitude of increase. Not just doubling their income/food supply, but a twenty-fold return! Further farming modifications will not yield as large a jump, but that sort of scale encouraged me that changing te...
Post a Comment
Read more