How This Farm Grows Rice With No Fertilizer or Chemicals

So behind you guys there, a couple of your farm team is planting the rice and what is that machine? It's a drum seeder and it's just a way to kind of make manual rice planting a little bit more efficient. In our area people move from seeding their rice with seedlings to direct seeding and so last year we had 10 people like basically walk and seed each portion and then that just we found this. This is like for the SRI rice technique so it's built with specific spacing in mind so it'll also space the rice correctly and that makes like de-weeding really easy for us. If he does broadcast it's really hard because then we don't use herbicides so we can't kill the weeds so then trying to select weeds while also stepping on seedlings is such a hard job. So this kind of organizes your seedlings into like a 30 by 30 so then you can walk and use a machine to de-weed. Our area like almost all farmers grow rice but they've been growing using such like bad techniques or with conventional techniques for really long and their yields have been slowly like very slowly increasing but their chemical use has been like really skyrocketing because the land is just getting more degraded but we wanted to do something in a different way and so we were like we can grow really good rice add better yields but also you know use biological methods. So all of our rice is grown using biology so we use compost extracts we coat the seeds in biology the full system and we've been seeing better and better yields as we grow and using less and less inputs. Yeah we also use rice husk biochar as well. Biochar is a way of taking organic materials and organic waste and then burning it in a low oxygen condition in order to create a really carbon rich material that then you can put back into your land. It kind of acts like a sponge so it's not really a nutrient at all or anything but it holds a lot of nutrients so you can charge it with whatever kind of nutrients and biology you want and it kind of stays in the air pockets between inside the biochar and that's really great when you are starting with really really poor soil it really brings the nutrients back but it also has a space to kind of hold the nutrients so you really need that because you know here we're starting with like 0.2% organic matter so like we're talking literally nothing left but like we were able to get better yields than conventional in the first season. So this plot we rented last season with 0.2% organic matter we brought the biology back and we got higher yields at a lower cost so you can kind of see it went like with no pest issue we had no pesticide no herbicide not even neem oil the plants just like they were like this big like it's pretty awesome that's fantastic yeah it's so cool it it's just something about nature like really wants to come back and like we kind of provide a small house for it and boom yeah we're gonna go check out how you make all this special biology and maybe we can get some tips too for us like home growers how can we incorporate some of these awesome techniques guys yeah man that's that's really impressive what do you use this rice for do you sell the rice or is it seed or what yeah a portion of it we grow kind of to sell as organic rice but we're also starting to get really passionate about saving heirloom rice varieties in thailand but also within other asian countries as well india and thailand both have like hundreds of thousands of rice varieties that people used to grow so like india itself i think had over 200,000 varieties of rice and now there's like eight that people grow so yeah and each one like was suited to kind of grow in a specific microclimate so like it would be very resistant to any drought like heat tolerance cold tolerance but now like we have a lot more issues and so like bringing some of these old varieties back will help us kind of also safeguard that the long-term rice production yeah and we have people who work with us on the farm they're a little bit older but they remember when they were growing up they had a different rice variety of seeds that they no longer grow but they remember that that particular variety required like no inputs no synthetic fertilizer whatsoever and their parents didn't have to use any type of pesticides to grow it or even like to input any synthetic fertilizer so yeah you know we don't want those varieties to go missing yeah that's true so how does this guy do it like he's just dragging this thing yeah he's also not wearing shoes i think it's the most comfortable way to yeah so there's little holes in the drum and then as you drag it the wheel spins and then the seeds drop into the rice patty yeah and then it germinates within a week and we also add a biological seed coating mix as well before you put before we put it in the drum seeder yeah we soak it one day and then we wait till it germinates a bit so when it goes into the soil it's already pre-germinated and we we want that because we want the biology to touch the root before like as it's touching in so then it develops all of the biological as the root system grows so yeah if you want to take a look if you look here you can kind of see some of the the seed coating with some compost and some other nutrients that we added and you can see that that's the root right yeah that's the root yeah so then they just fill it this in and then there's little holes here there's two settings one has many more holes then you cover it up with this little cloth thing so it's easy low it's only like 80 bucks so it's quite efficient