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Rice-Duck-Azolla-fish Cultivation: DR Takao Furuno

The document describes how Dr. Takao Furuno developed an integrated rice farming system called rice-duck-azolla-fish cultivation that eliminates the need for fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Ducks provide pest control and aerate the soil while their waste, combined with azolla, increases soil nutrition. This sustainable system has been successfully replicated across Southeast Asia.

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Hamza Ahmed Ali
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114 views

Rice-Duck-Azolla-fish Cultivation: DR Takao Furuno

The document describes how Dr. Takao Furuno developed an integrated rice farming system called rice-duck-azolla-fish cultivation that eliminates the need for fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. Ducks provide pest control and aerate the soil while their waste, combined with azolla, increases soil nutrition. This sustainable system has been successfully replicated across Southeast Asia.

Uploaded by

Hamza Ahmed Ali
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Rice-Duck-Azolla-fish Cultivation

The Japanese farmer and entrepreneur Dr Takao Furuno has developed rice-duck-Azolla-


loach cultivation…
Which is an integrated biosystem which eliminates the need for fertilizers, herbicides, and
pesticides by incorporating duck-raising into organic rice cultivation.
The approach is now being replicated with substantial success all over south-east Asia as
an effective way to boost farmers’ incomes, reduce environmental impact and improve food
security.
The operations simultaneously raise Aigamo ducklings, loaches (a species of fish), rice
and Azolla.

The ducklings provide pest management, replacing pesticides and herbicides by naturally
controlling pest populations and digging up or eating competing weeds.

The loach and duck waste, combined with the nitrate fixing properties of Azolla, increase
soil nutrition and maintain productivity levels that are comparable to conventional farming
operations without the need for costly synthetic fertilizers. The Azolla plants can later be
harvested for animal feed.

A normal organic rice farm would require significant human labor to keep weeds down and
maintain soil health, but the ducklings’ natural movement aerates the soil and strengthens
rice stalks.
Dr Furuno rotates the duck-rice system with vegetable crops, allowing him to maintain a
highly productive operation on a small plot of land in Japan. This form of rice cultivation
neutralizes a significant amount of the greenhouse gas emissions that rice paddies
produce.

Species Preservations
Dr. Anand Pereira and his wife, Geeta Pereira, own and run a model coffee farm called
“Joe’s Sustainable Coffee Plantation” on the foothills of the Western Ghats in India –
a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the eight “hottest hotspots” of biological diversity
in the world with over 5000 species of flowering plants, 139 mammal species, 508 bird
species and 179 amphibian species.

Azolla is a highly productive plant. It doubles its biomass in 3-10 days, depending on conditions
CoffEE Preservations

Their goal is to protect this rare habitat and they have worked diligently on sustainable
technologies for the past 25 years to develop a practical and sustainable system that can
greatly benefit other coffee farmers. This includes rainwater harvesting techniques using
their ‘rain gun sprinkler system’, the use of biofertilizers including Azolla, and the integration
of multiple complementary crops including coffee, areca nut, pepper, banana, ginger,
orange and rice

Their ‘shade grown coffee’ farm has become a model for both Indian and foreign farmers,
with many visiting the farm to seek technical help in setting up their own coffee estates.

Anand and Geeta’s January 2003 article ‘Bio-fertilizers for Coffee Plantations’ provides a
detailed analysis of the benefits of biofertilizers compared to those of chemical fertilizers, 

While in contrast with all the other organic fertilizers, azolla was the best due its high nitrogen
content and essential macronutrients…

Reforestation
Azolla is a good instrument for reforestation due to its massive and rapid growth as ive
mentioned earlier..
The Vasandham Society  .. started in 1987 to offer basic medical facilities to people in the
remote Varusanadu Valley of the Vaigai River in India
villages are situated on steep hillsides that are not serviced by buses due the absence of
roads.
The valley was once covered in dense forest, but large areas were deforested to make
room for villages and to provide land for agriculture 
area has suffered soil erosion, top soil degradation and a severely depleted water table
level that was aggravated by continued drought.
Vasandham Society now operates four programmes in 120 hamlets, reaching a total
population of around 60,000

The Vasandham Society has also introduced the use of Azolla to the region:
Space and Planetary Colonization
Azolla is ideally suited for controlled ecological life support systems (CELSS). due to the
limited amount of available space in these habitats. Azolla only needs a water (about one
inch), so that it can be grown in multi-layered frames that require less space than other
plants.
Other Potential candidates are Sweet potatoes
rice and wheat,
To give just one example, a Chinese team led by Xiaofeng Liu conducted experiments to
determine the capacity of Azolla to provide oxygen within an “Azolla-human” ecosystem of
CELSS.  Their results showed that in a CELSS, Azolla plants with a growing area of 16
square meters were able to provide the oxygen used by two adults

Azolla in Bolivia

Mitigation of erosion
Water Purification
Biodiversity and Azolla

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