RAWE Village Study of a Paddy-Based Farming System with a DSR vs Transplanted Rice Demonstration (Cuttack)

This bundle is a complete Rural Agricultural Work Experience (RAWE) project for a team of four B.Sc (Hons) Agriculture students attached to a village and the district Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK) in Semester 7. The setting is Baulagadia (a fictional name for a typical canal-and-rainfed village in Cuttack district, Odisha), where the farming system is built around kharif paddy, followed by green gram or black gram on residual moisture, a few vegetable plots near the tube-well, backyard poultry and two or three cows per household.

The project has two linked parts:

1. Village study — Participatory Rural Appraisal (social and resource map, transect walk, seasonal calendar, Venn diagram of institutions, pair-wise/matrix ranking of problems) and a benchmark survey of 40 farm households covering land holding, cropping pattern, input use, livestock, credit and extension contact.
2. On-farm demonstration — direct-seeded rice (DSR) compared with manual transplanting on adjoining 0.2 ha plots of two host farmers, with a full production record: operations calendar, input quantities, labour days, cost of cultivation, crop-cutting yield and benefit–cost ratio.

Findings go back to the village in a farmers' meeting and to the KVK as a short technical note. The bundle gives the survey schedule structure, PRA procedure, demonstration layout, record formats, division of work among four members, the RAWE report chapter plan, a 12-slide presentation and a viva bank. Everything is in the voice of a student team — you replace the village, the crop details and the numbers with your own field data.

Abstract

Paddy is the backbone of farming in coastal Odisha, but rising wages and delayed transplanting because of late monsoon onset make puddled transplanted rice increasingly costly. Direct-seeded rice (DSR) saves nursery raising, puddling and transplanting labour, but farmers worry about weeds and crop establishment. During the RAWE attachment, our team of four studied the paddy-based farming system of a Cuttack-district village through PRA and a benchmark survey of 40 households, and laid out a side-by-side demonstration of line-sown DSR and conventional transplanting on two host farms. We recorded every operation and cost and measured yield by crop cutting. The outputs are a village profile, a problem–solution matrix and a production record comparing the two establishment methods on cost, yield and B:C ratio.

Introduction

RAWE places final-year students in a village for most of a semester so that they learn farming as farmers practise it, and so that farmers see improved practices demonstrated on their own land. The KVK acts as the technical anchor: its subject-matter specialists guide demonstrations, and students take part in its trainings and field days.

Existing situation (identified in the first two weeks)

• Most holdings are below 1 ha and fragmented into 3–5 parcels.
• Paddy is transplanted by hired women labour, often 30–40 days after sowing the nursery because of late rain.
• Pulses after paddy are broadcast with little fertiliser; yields are low.
• Soil testing and weed management advice reach only a few farmers.

Proposed work

• A PRA-based village profile and matrix ranking of problems with farmers.
• A benchmark household survey with a structured schedule.
• A DSR vs transplanting demonstration with a complete production record.
• Extension activities: a method demonstration on seed treatment, a farmers' meeting and a field day at harvest.

Feasibility

• Technical: DSR with pre-emergence herbicide and one hand weeding is a KVK-recommended package; plot sizes are manageable by a student team.
• Economic: host farmers bear normal cultivation costs; the team documents them. Extra costs (seed treatment chemical, labels, printing) are under ₹3,000.
• Operational: the village is reachable daily from the RAWE hostel; the gram panchayat and the host farmers agreed in writing.

Farmers of the study village depend on kharif paddy for food and income, yet their cost of cultivation keeps rising while yields stay flat. Transplanting needs 25–30 women-days per hectare at the peak of the season, nurseries get delayed by erratic monsoon onset, and late-planted fields lose yield. Farmers have heard of direct seeding but lack local evidence on how it performs in their own soil, with their own weed pressure and at their own labour rates.

At the same time, RAWE students need a structured way to understand a whole village's farming system — land, water, crops, livestock, institutions and constraints — rather than a single crop in isolation. This project therefore (a) documents the paddy-based farming system of one village using PRA and a household survey, and (b) generates on-farm evidence comparing DSR with transplanted rice through a complete production record of costs, labour, yield and returns.

In scope

• One village in Cuttack district, 40 sampled farm households, the gram panchayat, PACS, SHGs and input dealers as institutions.
• Kharif season paddy: DSR vs transplanting on two host farms (0.2 ha each method per farm).
• PRA exercises, a structured survey, production records, crop cuts, simple statistics in Excel.
• Extension activities organised with the KVK and a short agro-industrial attachment visit.

Out of scope

• Replicated research-station trial design (RBD with many treatments) — this is an on-farm demonstration, not a thesis experiment.
• Rabi-season crops beyond documenting the cropping pattern.
• Soil or plant-tissue laboratory analysis beyond Soil Health Card values already available to farmers.
• Policy evaluation of government schemes.

Design

A mixed-method village study: participatory (PRA) and survey methods for the farming-system profile, and a paired on-farm demonstration (two farmers × two establishment methods) for the agronomic comparison.

Part A — Village study

Benchmark survey: 40 households selected by proportional random sampling across marginal (< 1 ha), small (1–2 ha) and others; schedule covers family, land, cropping pattern, inputs, livestock, implements, credit, extension contact and income sources.

Part B — Demonstration

• Treatments: T1 line-sown DSR (seed drill or manual line sowing, 20 cm rows, pre-emergence herbicide as recommended by the KVK, one hand weeding); T2 transplanting of 25-day seedlings at 20 × 15 cm.
• Same variety, same fertiliser dose as per the state package of practices, so the only difference is the establishment method.
• Observations: plant stand per m², tillers/hill or per m² at 30/60 DAS, weed count, days to 50% flowering, panicles/m², grain yield from three 5 m × 5 m crop cuts per plot, straw yield.
• Economics: cost of each operation (human labour at the village wage, machine hire, seed, fertiliser, chemicals), gross and net returns at the local procurement/market price, B:C ratio.
• Analysis: means and percentage change in Excel; a paired t-test on crop-cut yields where replicates allow.

Timeline (12 weeks of RAWE)