Dung-eating earthworms restore soil with organic fertilser in Bangladesh farms
KALIGANJ, Bangladesh: In Kaliganj village, 20 kilometres south of Rangpur city in Bangladesh, small farmers are turning to vermi-composting after crop yields started dropping. The problem was that soil fertility eroded due to organic nutrient depletion.
“In the early 1980s when I began cultivating crops with chemical fertilisers, I got bumper production of all crops,” said Azizar Rahim, a small farmer who until five years ago used to get three tonnes of Boro and two tonnes of Aman paddy per acre annually (Boro and Aman are the main cereal crops in Bangladesh).
To his dismay, after 20 years, his land no longer produced the same amount of paddy even though he continued to use the same amount of chemical fertilisers. Heavy use of agrochemicals introduced in the 1980s boosted food productivity but at the cost of the environment. Soil organisms and their natural fertility were destroyed, making crops less resistant to pests and diseases and adversely affecting human health.
“The yield was less than five per cent to 10 per cent than that of the earlier years and meanwhile, there was a 30 per cent to 40 per cent increase in the cost of production. I incurred huge losses with no end in sight,” Azizar told IPS.
Thousands of farmers like Azizar in the north of Bangladesh had the same experience. With this scenario as the backdrop, experts from the Bangladesh Soil Resource Test Institute (BSRTI) conducted soil tests in the region and discovered depletion of organic matter and a high increase of acidity in the soil.
Referring to the BSRTI experts’ findings, Bangladesh Regional (Rangpur) Farm Broadcast Officer Abu Sayem told IPS that the minimum requirement of organic matter in the soil is at least five per cent. “However, the organic nutrient amount in the soil had dropped down to two per cent at some places in the north, and this led to negative impacts on production,” Sayem added.
As agriculture is their main and only occupation, farmers of this region engage in diversified intercropping to produce more crops using the same land.
“To do this mammoth task, farmers in the region continuously use chemical fertilisers in their soil. Thus, the soil has lost organic nutrients and added acidity to a great extent, resulting in low yield and high production cost,” said Professor Dr Shafiqul Islam Sikdar, chair of the Department of Agronomy Department of Hazi Mohammad Danesh Science and Technology University in Dinajpur, 50 kms north of Rangpur.
He also observed that cropping intensity in the north is above 200 per cent, which is more than that of other regions in Bangladesh.
“The higher cropping intensity rate badly affected the soil,” Shafiqul added.
According to the Yearbook of Agricultural Statistics- 2016 published by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), the agriculture sector – with a 192 per cent cropping intensity – plays a pivotal role in the country’s economic development. About 35 million tonnes of food grains are grown annually by 18 million farming households, comprising more than 17 per cent of the country’s GDP.