IRRI, Rice Today;  Paula Bianca Ferrer   |  Dec 13, 2017

With the right tools, ordinary people can be extraordinary agents of change.

Figure: A Filipino farmer inspecting GSR8 in Victoria, Laguna. (Photo: IRRI)

“When I tried Green Super Rice (GSR), the highest yield that I had was nine tons per hectare,” recalled Maria Lourdes Mateo-Mundoc, an agriculturist at the Southern Cagayan Research Center (SCRC) under the Department of Agriculture (DA) in the Philippines. “The lowest was seven tons per hectare”.

A combination of more than 500 promising rice varieties and hybrids, GSR can tolerate drought, flood, and other environmental stresses. In 2014, the National Rice Program started the adaptability trials of several GSR lines across the country. The GSR Commercialization Project was the first project Mrs. Mundoc became involved with shortly after joining SCRC.

“I was amazed at GSR varieties because Dr. Lito Bautista of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), who was then a colleague in the project, told us some farmers were able to get as much as 15 tons per hectare,” she said. “He also showed me photos of areas in the Visayas region where the farmers reaped high harvests. So I decided to try it for myself,”

Seeing is believing

Her husband, a seed grower, was skeptical.

“He asked what I was growing,” Mrs. Mundoc said. “When he came to my family’s farm and saw the GSR he wanted to know if it was hybrid rice.” Hybrid rice typically produces double—sometimes even triple—the harvest of inbred rice. “I laughed and told him it was GSR.”

Now, his community of farmers also likes GSR. In just .025 hectare, Mrs. Mundoc’s husband was able to harvest about three tons of rice. Normally, he would have been able to harvest only around two tons.

“All the GSR lines also had good eating quality,” she noted. “Although most found GSR8 had the finest eating quality, I still prefer GSR1. Compared to GSR12, which is also quite aromatic, you can almost taste the aroma of GSR1.”

Proof of concept

Mrs. Mundoc continued the field trial of 12 GSR lines in her farming community while she was with the GSR commercialization project with SCRC.

“Besides irrigated areas, we tested them in the adverse environments around Cagayan, such as rainfed, submerged, and saline areas,” she shared. Cagayan, in Northern Luzon, is one of the country’s top rice-producing provinces.

“In addition to 213,000 hectares of irrigated areas, Cagayan also has 44,000 hectares of rainfed areas,” said Dr. Ernesto Guzman, the rice action officer at the DA in the region. “We started setting up the protocols for commercializing GSR in the 2014 dry season with Dr. Jauhar Ali, a rice breeder at the International Rice Research Institute.”

One of the sites in Cagayan where they conducted GSR testing was Aparri because it was perennially affected by salinity and farmers could usually only harvest around 0.8-2.8 tons per hectare.

“It’s one of the problem areas here in Cagayan,” noted SCRC Manager Rodolfo Bayucan.

See: http://ricetoday.irri.org/seeds-of-change/