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Tilling the Floodplain: How Farmers Embrace the Power of Floods
Every year, when the monsoons arrive on the North India Gangetic plain, the river spreads its girth across miles on either bank. When the floodwaters recede, they leave behind organic material, which Siyaram Bhind, a farmer in Mirzapur, a town in eastern Uttar Pradesh, calls “black gold.” Downstream, in the neighboring district of Bhadohi, another farmer, 29-year-old Rohit Bhardwaj, looks at his bumper crop of painted gourds on the Ganges floodplain, and calls it a “blessing from mother Ganges.”
For centuries, farmers like Bhind and Bhardwaj have engaged in complex trade-offs between coping with the challenges of floods and capitalizing on the benefits that floods bring: fertile alluvial soil and a natural irrigation mechanism. “This rudimentary form of agriculture has been practiced since history,” says Rinku Singh, PhD, who has researched the impact of what’s known as flood recession agriculture along the Gangetic plain. But today, as climate change is causing rainfall and flooding to become more erratic and intense, flood recession farming is more important than ever before: Singh has found that it boosts the livelihood and food security of marginal farmers living near riverbanks, making them more resilient to the economic consequences of floods. Moreover, it incentivizes them to not construct buildings or roads or mine sand from the floodplain, which, in turn, keeps the river in good health.
Rohit Bhardwaj. Credit: Geetanjali Krishna
“Almost every year, the river water enters our village and makes our lives miserable, but it also leaves behind fertile soil that gives us a good harvest,” Bhind says, pointing out varieties of gourds that thrive in the well-drained floodplain with its topsoil of silt. He plants peas, chickpeas and mustard in addition to other vegetables when the floodwaters recede in October. And after harvesting the pea crop in February, he says that from late March until the floods return in mid-July, he is able to harvest vegetables every four to five days.
This is harder than it sounds, however: The floodplain is more exposed than inland farms in winter, which leaves the crop vulnerable to night temperatures that fall below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Regular depredations by herds of stray cattle, wild pigs and blue bulls compel farmers to wake up every two hours to check on their crops. And in summer, once the crop bears fruit on the windswept floodplain, it is easily scorched by the hot winds from the west. Yet Bhind — perhaps because he spends very little on irrigation (even in summer, he waters his crop just once or twice a month, while fields further inland need watering twice a week) and fertilizer — chooses to till the floodplains, as do thousands of others.
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