Ducks Instead Of Pesticides? This Ancient Chinese Farming Technique Is Becoming Popular Worldwide

Dec 18, 2018

Sustainable farming might just be a few ducks away!

Rice-duck farming is an organic farming technology that's particularly integral for resource-poor producers. It allows them to farm high-quality rice organically and at a low price.

Farmers in Japan, China, Nepal, France, and Iran are starting to go back to an ancient Chinese way of rice farming. It uses fewer pesticides and more ducks. Because the application of industrial technologies is an ever-increasing threat in relation to the environment, many farmers are returning to this ancient method to farm an environmentally viable and highly prized commodity.

The farmers are making use of ducks rather than pesticides. The ducks eat every insect, weed and even the weed seed, but allow the rice to flourish.

Integrated rice-duck farming system (IRDFS) can be identified as one of the primary practices of traditional Chinese farming. IRDFS has produced positive effects on rice growth; disease, insect and weed management, as well as paddy biodiversity and the surrounding environment. Examples from similar countries such as Bangladesh, Japan, and Vietnam have shown how the addition of ducks to rice fields is a productive and successful farming strategy.

Such technology has shown to be advantageous in terms of providing economic, social and environmental gains. This kind of farming technology releases ducks into the field 10-20 days after the transplantation of rice until the rice flowers.

The combination of ducks into rice fields generates a symbiotic relationship among the rice and the ducks to produce the following mutual benefits:

• Ducks consume harmful weeds and insects to bypass the application of chemical pesticides and weeding that occurs in the rice field by hand.
• Ducks receive a nutritious diet of weeds and insects within the rice field.
• The droppings from the ducks act as an all-natural fertilizer to the rice crop to prevent the requirement of chemical fertilizers.
• The continual movement of the ducks in fields provides natural aeration and stimulation to increase the abundance of nutrients such as Phosphorous, Nitrogen, and Potash in the rice crop
• Rice-duck advancements cause the reduction of methane gas emissions from rice fields for a lessening effect on climate change

Compared to the conventional rice farming processes, integrated rice-duck technology comes out on top in terms of minimizing the price of production, enhancing rice production, the environmental benefits and improving the farmers' revenue through the sale of duck meat and organic rice.

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