J. Sujono et al. / Agricultural Sciences 2 (2011) 511-517
Copyright © 2011 SciRes. Openly accessible at http://www.scirp.org/journal/AS/
516
Grain yield is not the only factor that attract the
farmers to apply the current the sugested method. Even
though the SII management practices yields much higher
grain than the traditional (continuous flooding) as re-
ported by many researchers [6,12,20], it takes time for
farmers to apply the SRI management practice that
mainly consist of using young seedling, one seddling per
hill, soil moist condition, wider spacing. Even at the
some places, the farmers do not want to try it due to they
think it is labour intensive (e.g. [21,22]), difficult to
maintain especially weeding the weed that grow fastly
due to there is no ponding water and keeping the soil at
moist condition rather than flooded (e.g. [22]).
In terms of maintaining the water in the paddy field, it
is likely that the AWD could be accepted by the farmers
not only due to yield higher grain and water productivity
that others water saving irrigation (see Tabl e 3) but also
more reliable in practice. The irrigation water interval is
much longer than SRI current practice, it is appropriate
for paddy field that used rotation irrigation system due to
limited water supply and the AWD is easier for farmers
to use than aerobic rice systems like the SDC (e.g. [23]).
The use of combination between the SRI management
practice and AWD for paddy rice cultivation is also
supported by others [9,20,22]. Uphoff [20] mentioned
that the SRI water management practices currently rec-
ommended may still be suboptimal for many conditions,
with more water reduction possible. Based on the ex-
periment combining between the SRI current manage-
ment practice with AWD increased water productivity
significantly than the normal method (e.g. [9,22]).
4. CONCLUSIONS
The experiment revealed that the amount of irrigated
water for paddy rice cultivation, grain yield and water
productivity are highly depends on the water irrigation
treatment used. A combination between the SII current
management practice and other water irrigation treat-
ments could increase the water productivity by reducing
the water irrigated used and increasing the grain yield.
Among the water irrigation treatment tested together
with the SII management practice, the AWD is the most
promising one followed by SWD, the SII current man-
agement practice and the SDC due to the following:
1) The AWD could reduce the irrigated water up to
13.1% compared with the SII method, whereas the
SWD and SDC reduced the water up to 5.4 and
18.4, respectively.
2) On average the AWDs and SWDs increased the
grain yield by 22.9% and 17.9%, whereas the SDC
reduced the yield up to 14% compare to the SII
treatment.
3) The AWDs treatments have significantly improved
the water productivity by 41.6%, the SWDs in-
crease by 24.2% relative to the SII treatments. On
the other hand, the SDC performs quite similar
with the SII treatments, since the grain yields un-
der SDC treatment was less than the SII.
5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank to the Hitachi Schollarship Foundation for the
financial support to conduct the experiment in Kyushu University
Fukuoka Japan. The experiment was conducted at the Kyushu
University Experimental farm.
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