Organic rice farming is more than just sowing the seed and forgetting it till harvest time. It’s a multiple year practice, including decreasing the weed seed and constructing soil fertility.
Our farms are situated in Central Punjab and lands are irrigated by Himalayan water through intensive network of canal system thus bringing aroma in grains of rice. The alluvial soils, ample water and sizzling climate are the complete ecosystem for cultivating our high quality long grain basmati rice and non basmati rice. Our alluvial soil contains fine grained fertile soil deposited by water from river beds. The irrigation water is very gentle to lurch in our fine-textured soil and tends to hold water impressively.
Most of large farms in Pakistan are managed by land lords, who aren’t present on the farms, and their farms are run by workers. Whereas, small land lords, who are active on their farms have limited budget for extensive use of inputs, consequently they are required to expand their investments. As Panhwar (2004) pointed out that small land owners frequently decrease farm inputs to cover their risk, but risk environmental degradation such as water logging drainage, soil erosion and etc. She also stated that organic farmer pays more to labours, also regulates his farm together with external farm environmental costs.
Challenges in organic rice farming
In organic rice farming, a major challenge is weed since any use of synthetic herbicides aren’t permitted for organic farmers. However, crop rotation helps with weed control in rice. Pakistan Organic Farms makes an effort to plan their crop rotation in such a way that the organic matter of lands may be increased. Besides, we make sure every farm has a widespread use of cover crops, also referred to as green manure. In order to provide nutrient and feed the microorganisms for the cash crop, we plow back green manure into the soil. We also make extensive use of organic inputs, compost, which is produced on farm from cattle manure. As several researches have indicated that soils get contaminated with arsenical pesticides from chicken manure, therefore we have limited our compost only to cattle manure to achieve lowest concentration of arsenic in rice and within the limit set by FDA and European Union Regulation.