Rice is responsible for about 10% of global methane emissions, due to the way it’s grown. The crop is largely grown in flooded fields as a weed-avoidance practice, since other grasses aren’t adapted to live under flooded conditions. The water cuts off soil and organic matter from oxygen, which leads to the production of methane, a gas that has 80 times the near-term global warming potential of carbon dioxide.
Rize plans to tackle this issue by helping farmers use a simple technique called alternate wetting and drying, which involves drying out rice paddies for brief periods throughout the season. As the rice canopy grows, it becomes safe to dry out the field and thus reduce methane emissions. It’s a proven technique, but farmers aren’t implementing it because they have no incentive to, according to Ben Runkle, an associate professor at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering.
Rize gets around that hurdle by selling farmers seeds, fertilizer, pesticides and other inputs for a slightly lower price than local farm stores in exchange for implementing the practice. It can offer a lower price by buying those supplies in bulk at wholesale discounts that smallholder farms can’t get, said Chief Executive Officer Dhruv Sawhney.
Farmers "are taking a risk on their livelihood every time they change an agricultural practice, especially one like changing your irrigation practice,” said Marie Cheong, founding partner of Wavemaker Impact. "So we had to really think through what would be the right incentive model for farmers adopting this practice to be worthwhile.”
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Currently, the startup is working with farming co-ops in Indonesia and Vietnam and plans on expanding to other parts of South and Southeast Asia. It also plans on expanding its revenue stream as early as this year to include the sale of carbon credits Rize will generate from the resulting methane emissions reductions, revenue which it plans on splitting with farmers, Sawhney said.
The company is now on its third farming season and services about 2,500 hectares. Early tests showed methane emissions reduced by as much as 50%. Farmers working with Rize haven’t noticed any drop in yield, with some even experiencing small improvements in yield and bottom line, according to Sawhney. That’s contributed to the startup’s 98% farmer retention rate. Still, that’s a minuscule proportion of the land used for rice farming; Vietnam alone has about 7 million hectares of fields.
Is that methane release part of a closed cycle though? Sure, the farming accelerated it, but humans didn't invent the process of animals existing, depositing refuse that ends up in the soil, land...
Is that methane release part of a closed cycle though? Sure, the farming accelerated it, but humans didn't invent the process of animals existing, depositing refuse that ends up in the soil, land being saturated with water and then it being released into the atmosphere. That's been going on as long as mammalian life has existed...and rice farming has been happening for millennia.
According to NASA, methane has a half life of 7-12 years in the atmosphere and it eventually leaves. (40% of it also comes from natural wetlands.) The quantity in the atmosphere has doubled since the Industrial Revolution though, so there is definitely need to curtail some of it, though I am skeptical that rice farming practices (which have remained relatively unchanged since antiquity) represent a major part of the change, other than the volume increasing with population growth.
It's good that a way to reduce the emissions from rice farming has been found, and with a relatively simple practice, but cutting the quoted 10% in half is fairly minor in the scheme of things.
One thing that bothers me a lot in climate coverage, and the popular understanding of it, is that there's a general panic about all CO2 and methane sources, when the root issue is fossil carbon and trapped methane being extracted and released into the atmosphere. There exist natural cycles of CO2 and methane emission and removal in the overall ecosystem. We desperately need to stop introducing those gasses from outside the system as inputs, and we need capture methods to bring us to net zero or negative emissions...but the existence of life on this planet precludes the possibility of gross zero methane and carbon emissions.
I see emissions reductions like voting: many changes are a drop in the bucket, but it all adds up. Admittedly, the rest of the world’s “votes” will contribute a lot more than any single source....
I see emissions reductions like voting: many changes are a drop in the bucket, but it all adds up. Admittedly, the rest of the world’s “votes” will contribute a lot more than any single source. I’m also a bit skeptical that it will work.
But if this startup succeeded in scaling up to eventually reducing rice farming methane emissions by 50%, that would be huge, amazing, well worth bragging about, and far more than you or I are likely to do to mitigate climate change in our lifetimes. So I’m for cheering them on, and we can only hope that there are other kinds of emissions reductions that do so much.
From the article:
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Is that methane release part of a closed cycle though? Sure, the farming accelerated it, but humans didn't invent the process of animals existing, depositing refuse that ends up in the soil, land being saturated with water and then it being released into the atmosphere. That's been going on as long as mammalian life has existed...and rice farming has been happening for millennia.
According to NASA, methane has a half life of 7-12 years in the atmosphere and it eventually leaves. (40% of it also comes from natural wetlands.) The quantity in the atmosphere has doubled since the Industrial Revolution though, so there is definitely need to curtail some of it, though I am skeptical that rice farming practices (which have remained relatively unchanged since antiquity) represent a major part of the change, other than the volume increasing with population growth.
https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/methane/
It's good that a way to reduce the emissions from rice farming has been found, and with a relatively simple practice, but cutting the quoted 10% in half is fairly minor in the scheme of things.
One thing that bothers me a lot in climate coverage, and the popular understanding of it, is that there's a general panic about all CO2 and methane sources, when the root issue is fossil carbon and trapped methane being extracted and released into the atmosphere. There exist natural cycles of CO2 and methane emission and removal in the overall ecosystem. We desperately need to stop introducing those gasses from outside the system as inputs, and we need capture methods to bring us to net zero or negative emissions...but the existence of life on this planet precludes the possibility of gross zero methane and carbon emissions.
I see emissions reductions like voting: many changes are a drop in the bucket, but it all adds up. Admittedly, the rest of the world’s “votes” will contribute a lot more than any single source. I’m also a bit skeptical that it will work.
But if this startup succeeded in scaling up to eventually reducing rice farming methane emissions by 50%, that would be huge, amazing, well worth bragging about, and far more than you or I are likely to do to mitigate climate change in our lifetimes. So I’m for cheering them on, and we can only hope that there are other kinds of emissions reductions that do so much.
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.ph/9gGbM