Developing and disseminating alternate wetting and drying water-saving technology in the Philippines

Abstract

Most rice farmers in Asia practice continuous flooding and maintain more than 5-cm water depth in lowland irrigated rice fields throughout the cropping seasonto obtain maximum yield. This practice uses more than the actual amount of water needed to produce riceand much of it is actually lost through seepage, evaporation, and percolation. To save water, farmers primarily have to reduce these losses while maintaining the transpiration requirements of plants to ensure a good yield. Alternate wetting and drying (AWD) is atechnology that does not require rice fields to be continuously flooded. In the Philippines, AWD was initially implemented through a project called “Technology Transfer for Water Savings (TTWS)” in 2001-04, which aimed to develop and implement a framework for the transfer, adaptation, adoption, and dissemination ofAWD among farmers in the Philippines. The dissemination of safe AWD practices included novel tools such as the “field water tube” and easy-to-understand information materials such as flyers, brochures, and posters to guide the implementation of AWD in farmers’ fields. The first 2 years of the project were designed as a participatory learning phase with selected farmers who were using irrigation water from pump systems in Central Luzon, Philippines. After the trials, the farmers from these systems reported savings of 16% to 30% of irrigation water and an increased net profit of more than PHP 2,000. Later, more farmers in these systems adopted the technology, and it spilled over to gravity irrigation systems in the country. Our expanding impact-pathway networks (both scaling out and scaling up) have been driven by widespread training activities, while building on necessary outscaling mechanisms, including documenting evidence from local success stories, increasing buy-in from local R&D partners, and policy support