The document summarizes experiences with the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) method in Myanmar. SRI is a management system that produces more productive and robust rice plants through improved handling of plants, soil, water, sunlight, and nutrients. It was introduced to Myanmar in 2001 and has since spread to many townships. SRI results in higher yields, reduced costs, and greater resilience to stresses through practices like young seedling transplantation with wider spacing, reduced flooding, and mechanical weeding. Field trials in Myanmar have shown yield increases of 20-50% compared to conventional methods. SRI is now practiced on over 1,300 acres in Myanmar with average yields of 107 baskets per acre.

1. System of Rice Intensification-SRI
Experiences in Myanmar
စပါးအစြမ္းဖြင့္စိုက္ပ်ိဳးေရး
ျပည္တြင္းအေတြ႔အႀကံဳမ်ား
Thein Su
Retired Associate Professor
Agriculture University

2. What is SRI?
SRI is a management system for rice changing how
plants, soil, water, sunlight and nutrients are handled ‐‐
to produce more productive, more robust plants from
any given variety, i.e., to get better phenotypes from
any particular genotype.
စပါးအစြမ္းဖြင့္စိုက္ပ်ိဳးေရးဆိုတာ ဘာလဲ
စပါးအစြမ္းဖြင့္စိုက္ပ်ိဳးေရးသည္ စပါးပင္ႀကီးထြားမႈပိုမိုေကာင္းမြန္လာၿပီး
အထြက္ပိုလာေစရန္အတြက္ ေျမ၊ ေရ၊ အလင္းေရာင္၊ အာဟာရႏွင့္ အပင္ကို
စီမံခန္႔ခြဲလုပ္ေဆာင္ေပးသည့္ စိုက္ပ်ိဳးေရးျဖစ္သည္။ မည္သည့္စပါးမ်ိဳးပင္ျဖစ္ေစ
မူလဗီဇကိုျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲရန္မလိုဘဲ စပါးပင္၏ပတ္ဝန္းက်င္ကို
အေကာင္းဆံုးစီမံခန္႔ခြဲလုပ္ေဆာင္ေပးလိုက္ျခင္းျဖင့္
စပါးပင္၏သြင္ျပင္လကၡဏာရပ္ မ်ားပိုမိုေကာင္းလာကာ
အထြက္မ်ားတိုးလာျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

3. (SRI)

4. SRI in Myanmar
1983 – Developed in Madagascar by F. Laulanie
2001 – Introduced to Myanmar by Metta Foundation in
Kachin and Northern Shan State
2005 – Estimated around 50,000 households began using
SRI method in Kachin and Nothern Shan (Kabir and
Uphoff, 2007). Metta has been still practicing SRI in
their project villages
2005 onwards– Some DOA staff tried SRI practices by
individual interests
2008 – U Thein Su tried adopting SRI in WA region, and
then up to now
2011-12 – Dr. Aung Thu, Rector of Taungoo Univ. tried SRI
2016 – All Townships of DOA adopt SRI in possible areas
by the guidance of Present Minister of MOALI

5. Global Spread of SRI
• Before 1999 – Madagascar
• 1999-2000 – China, Indonesia
• 2000-01 – Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cuba, Laos, Gambia, India,
Myanmar, Nepal, Philippines, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Thailand
• 2002-03 – Benin, Guinea, Mozambique, Peru
• 2004-05 – Senegal, Pakistan, Vietnam
• 2006-07 – Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Iran, Iraq, Zambia; Afghanistan, Brazil,
Mali
• 2008 - Costa Rica, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, Japan, Rwanda
• 2009-10 – Malaysia, Timor Leste, DPRK, Haiti, Kenya, Panama
• 2011-12 – Colombia, Korea, Taiwan, Tanzania; Burundi,
Dominican Republic, Niger, Nigeria, Togo
• 2013-14 – Cameroon, Liberia, Malawi, Congo DR, Ivory Coast, US
By 2005, the”proof of concept” for SRI’s beneficial effects on rice production
had been demonstrated in 22 countries that produce about 88% of the
world’s rice.
• By 2015, this percentage had reached about 98%.

7. Basic Practices of SRI
1. Raise seedlings in un-flooded nurseries
(dry nursery bed)
2. Transplant seedlings at a very young age
3. Transplant seedlings quickly,
carefully and shallow

8. 4. Transplant seedlings at wider distance
5. Transplant singly
6. Transplant seedlings in un-flooded plot
Drawing of
square grids by
simple rake

9. 7. Do not continuously flood the soil
8. Weed control is preferably done with
a simple mechanical hand weeder
(Rotary Weeder).
9. Provide as much organic matter as
possible to the soil

10. Difference s between
conventional and SRI practices
Conventional practice
SRI seedling

11. Transplanting
Conventional – on flooded field
SRI – on un-flooded field

12. After transplant
Conventional yellowing stage
SRI looks not like a transplanted field

13. Most of the time ,floode the field
in conventional practice
Water management
The field not flooded at all times in SRI

14. What will happen next
If management practices are so ?

15. Transplanting Just transplanted
55 days after sowing 66 days after sowingAt near harvest
Progress in Growth in Myay Bon

16. Progress in Growth in Shwebo SAI
115 DAS
Counting effective tillers
Just transplanted
33 DAS

17. From one young seedling (left) to nearly 100 tillers (right) in Shwebo SAI – 2017 rainy season

18. From one young seedling (left) to 223 tillers (right) in Indonesia, 2009

19. Field visit to Shwebo Pawsan paddy plots
Plant with 110 effective tillers in Shwebo
110 Effective tillers 130 tillers in Thapeikkyin90 Effective tillers

20. Sr Township Variety Yield
Basket/acre
Yield
Ton/hectare
Season
1 ဖယ္ခံု စပ္မ်ိဳး ၉ှ၃ 195 10 2017, summer
2 နမ့္ခမ္း စပ္မ်ိဳး ၄ဿ၃ 164 8.5 2017, summer
3 ေျမပံု ဆင္းသုခ 160 8.2 2017 , rainy
4 ပုသိမ္ႀကီး ပုလဲသြယ္ 150 7.7 2017, summer
5 ေခ်ာင္းဦး ရက္ ၉ှ 146 7.5 2017, summer
6 မိုင္းဆတ္ ဆင္းေရႊှါ 143 7.4 2017, summer
7 ေရစႀကိဳ မေနာသုခ 132 6.8 2017, summer
8 အင္းေတာ္ ဆင္းဧကရီ ၃ 131 6.8 2017, summer
9 ဗန္းေမာ္ ဆင္းဧကရီ ၃ 130 6.7 2017, summer
10 ေျမာင္းျမ သီးထပ္ရင္ 127.5 6.6 2017, summer
11 ဘားအံ ဆင္းသုခ 126.5 6.5 2017, summer
12 မိုင္းဆတ္ ဆင္းဧကရီ ၃ 126 6.5 2017, summer
Yield

21. Outstanding yields in other countries
1. Sri Lanka 329 b/a 17 t/h
2. India 310 b/a 16 t/h
3. China 203 b/a 10.5 t/h
4. Indonesia 184 b/a 9.5 t/h
5. Cambodia 115 b/a 8 t/h

22. According to Jaisingh Gnanadurai, joint director of agriculture in the southern Indian state of
Tamil Nadu, farmer S Sethumadhavan from Alanganallur has harvested a record yield of
nearly 24 tones of paddy rice per hectare using the system of rice intensification method
(SRI). (13.5.2014)

23. 2017-2018 Sown Acre and Yield
In Myanmar
1. Total sown area acre 1371
2. Total harvested acre 1356
3. Yield (baskets) per acre 107.5

24. What Benefits Can Be Achieved with SRI?
1. Higher grain yields – 20‐50%, even >100%
2. Water savings – 30‐50% reductions in irrigation
3. Reduced costs of production – usually 10‐20%
4. Higher net farmer incomes – 50‐100% or more
5. Shorter crop duration – often 5‐1o days or more
6. Higher milling outturn by 10‐20%, due to fewer
unfilled grains & less breakage during milling
7. Greater resistance to pests and diseases and
more tolerance of climatic stresses
HOW are these effects achieved? No ‘magic’ – good
agronomic practices mobilizing existing potentials
and interaction of ROOTS & SOIL BIOTA

27. In the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, a regular field in the foreground on left and
an SRI field on the right after a storm had hit both of them (Dill et al. 2013).

28. Test plots at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University in India after a storm passed over;
the plot in foreground was conventionally cultivated, while the plot behind is SRI.

29. Kenya after a freak storm in November 2011; the rice on left
grown with conventional cultivation practices was badly lodged;
a nearby field cultivated with SRI methods, seen on right,
sustained no damage.

30. Why SRI Is Climate‐Smart Agriculture
• Reduced water requirements – higher crop water‐use
efficiency benefits both natural ecosystems and people
in competition with agriculture for scarce water supplies
• Less use of inorganic fertilizer – reactive N is “the third
major threat to our planet after biodiversity loss and
climate change” ‐ already returns are greatly diminishing
• Less reliance on agrochemicals for crop protection ‐
which enhances the quality of both soil and water
• Buffering against the effects of climate change –
drought, storms (resist lodging), cold temperatures
• Some reduction in greenhouse gases (GHG) – (CH4) is
reduced without producing offsetting (N2O) emissions;
also some reductions made in ‘carbon footprint’ with
less production, transportation and use of fertilizers

31. Three rows and five rows power weeder invented by DAR

32. Thank you
For your kind attention