Every autumn, Anil Kalyan, from Kutail village in India’s northern state of Haryana, would join tens of thousands of other paddy farmers to set fire to the leftover stalks after the rice harvest to clear the field for planting wheat.
But this year, Kalyan opted for change. He signed his land up for a trial being held in Haryana and neighbouring Punjab as an alternative to the environmentally hazardous stubble burning that is commonplace across India and a major cause of Delhi’s notorious smog.
His 16 hectares (40 acres) were instead serviced by a tractor spraying an enzyme, which decomposes the stubble into useful fertiliser in just under a month.
“We used to burn the stubble. We had no other solution for it. Burning caused quite a lot of problems – one was pollution, the second was the death of soil-friendly microbes, and the yield also reduced a lot. The costs incurred increased a lot every time we ploughed the field,” he says.
“This [new solution] will benefit us a lot. It will reduce our cost, increase our yield severalfold, and reduce pollution to a great extent.”
The crop-residue management programme, the largest ever project to eliminate stubble burning in India, hopes to end the scorching of more than 2.3m hectares (9,000 sq miles) of paddy fields annually. The scheme was conceived and led by nurture.farm, a digital platform for sustainable agriculture that was launched 18 months ago.
More than 700 spraying machines were deployed across 170,000 hectares in 23 districts. More than 25,000 farmers took part in the experiment.
Findings from the trial, published on Wednesday, found more than 1m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions had been prevented.
The enzyme, developed by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, increases organic carbon in the soil and maintains overall soil health. Satellite pictures from the European Space Agency were used by nurture.farm to locate burning fields.
Stubble burning occurs globally, but particularly in India, the world’s largest rice exporter. The fires diminish nutrients in the soil as well as adding to air pollution. During the crop-burning season, the practice can account for up to 45% of Delhi’s pollution, according to government meteorologists.
Dhruv Sawhney, chief operating officer at nurture.farm, says more than 70,000 farm fires were detected by satellite imagery in this year’s stubble-burning season in India.
He says: “Stubble burning has now become a perennial issue because of a mismatch of policy and agricultural practices and, crucially, the lack of options available to farmers.”
He wants to give farmers carbon credits for good agricultural practices, to sustain and scale up the project. The firm is launching a “sustainably grown rice” label so people can buy rice from the fields where burning no longer happens.
“We’re also considering generating more carbon credits through introducing additional sustainable practices such as alternative wetting and drying [of rice paddies], which will save water and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” says Sawhney.
The programme will expand next year to cover about 800,000 hectares of land, roughly 40% of the area usually burned.
Previous bans on stubble burning and threats of fines have done little to dissuade farmers, who see it as the only viable option to clear fields in the short period between two crops. Faced with farmers’ protests, the government decriminalised stubble burning in November.
“If just by penalising farmers, stubble burning could be stopped, we should have been able to end it by now. We have evidence that in areas where alternatives are implemented, fire incidents have come down,” says Anumita Roychowdhury, head of the clean air programme at India’s Centre for Science and Environment, in the Hindu.
“Penalty without access to solutions does not work,” Roychowdhury says.
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