Systems approaches for agricultural development: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Systems Approaches for Agricultural Development, 2–6 December 1991, Bangkok, Thailand

528 Pages·1993·11.09 MB·English

by  L. A. Hunt (auth.)

SYSTEMS APPROACHES FOR AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
Systems Approaches for Sustainable Agricultura! Development
VOLUME 2
Scienti/ic Editor
F.W.T. Penning de Vries, CABO-DLO, Wageningen, The Netherlands
International Steering Committee
An international steering committee wiIl support the series
Aims and Scope
The book series Systems Approaches for Sustainable Agricultural Development is
intended for readers ranging from advanced students and research leaders to
research scientists in developed and developing countries. It wiIl contribute to the
development of sustainable and productive systems in the tropics, subtropics and
temperate regions, consistent with changes in population, environment, technology
and economic structure.
The series will bring together and integrate disciplines related to systems ap
proaches for sustainable agricultural development, in particular from the technical
and the socio-economic sciences, and presents new developments in these areas.
Furthermore, the series wiIl generalize the integrated views, results and experiences
to new geographical areas and will present alternative options for sustained
agricultural development for specific situations.
The volumes to be published in the series wiIl be, generally, multi-authored and
result from multi-disciplinary projects, symposiums, or workshops, or are invited.
AH books will meet the highest possible scientific quality standards and wiIl be up
to-date. The series aims to publish approximately three books per year, with a
maximum of 500 pages each.
The titles published in this series are listed at the end ofthis volume.
Systems approaches for agricultural
development
Proceedings of the International Symposium on
Systems Approaches for Agricultural Development,
2-6 December 1991, Bangkok, Thailand
Edited by
FRITS PENNING DE VRIES
DLO Centre for Agrobiological Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands
PAULTENG
International Rice Research Institute, Manila, Philippines
and
KLAAS METSELAAR
DLO Centre for Agrobiological Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands
Springer Science+Business Media, B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Systeas approaches for agrlcultural developaent I edlted by F.H.T.
Pennlng de Vries. P.S. Teng. K. Metselaar.
p. ca. -- (Systeas approaches for sustainable agrtcultural
developaent ; v. 2)
Includes tndex.
ISBN 978-0-7923-1881-1 ISBN 978-94-011-2842-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-2842-1
1. Agrtcultural systeas--Congresses. 2. Crops--Congresses.
3. Crops--Matheaatlcal aOdels--Congresses. 4. Agricultural systeas
-Research--Congresses. 6. Rlce--Congresses. 1. Pennlng de Vrles.
F. H. T. II. Teng. P. S. III. Meuelaar. K. IV. Seriss.
S494.6.S96S96 1992b
338.1--dc20 92-20496
ISBN 978-0-7923-1881-1
printed on acid-free paper
AII rights reserved
@ 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in1993
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanica1, inc1uding photocopying, recording
or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the
copyright owners.
Contents
Preface ix
SESSION 1. CROP PRODUCTION: GENOTYPIC
CONSTRAINTS
Designing improved plant types: a breeder's viewpoint
L.A. Hunt 3
Improvement of rice plant type concepts: systems research enables
interaction of physiology and breeding
M. Dingkuhn, F.W.T. Penning de Vries and K.M. Miezan 19
Designing improved plant types for the semiarid tropics: agronomists'
viewpoints
R.C. Muchow and P.S. Carberry 37
Simulation in pre-testing of rice genotypes in Tamil Nadu
S. Palanisamy, F.W.T. Penning de Vries, S. Mohandass,
T .M. Thiyagarajan and A.A. Kareem 63
Genetic specific data for crop modeling
J. T. Ritchie 77
SESSION 2. CROP PRODUCTION: WEATHER CONSTRAINTS
Agro-ecological zoning using crop growth simulation models:
characterization of wheat environments of India
P .K. Aggarwal 97
An agroclimatic approach to agricultural development in India
R.K. Singh and D.N. Singh 111
Optimising harvest operations against weather risk
G.Y. Abawi 127
v
vi
The impacts of climate change on rice yield: evaluation of the
efficacity of different modeling approaches
D. Bachelet, J. van Sickle and C.A. Gay 145
Rice production and climate change
F.W.T. Penning de Vries 175
SESSION 3. CROP PRODUCTION: SOIL CONSTRAINTS
A systems approach to the assessment and improvement of water use
efficiency in the North China Plain
Tian-Duo Wang 193
Soil data for crop-soil models
J. Bouma, M.C.S. Wopereis, J.H.M. W6sten and A. Stein 207
Root ventilation, rhizosphere modification, and nutrient uptake by
rice
G.J.D. Kirk 221
Adjustment of nitrogen inputs in response to a seasonal forecast in a
region of high climatic risk
B.A. Keating, R.L. McCown and B.M. Wafula 233
Maize modeling in Malawi: a tool for soil fertility research and
development
U. Singh, P.K. Thornton, A.R. Saka and J.B. Dent 253
SESSION 4. CROP PRODUCTION: BIOLOGICAL CONSTRAINTS
Pest damage relations at the field level
K.J. Boote, W.D. Batchelor, J.W. Jones, H. Pinnschmidt and
G. Bourgeois 277
Quantification of components contributing to rate-reducing resistance
in a plant virus pathosystem
F.W. Nutter, Jr. 297
The rice leaf blast simulation model 'Epiblast'
C.K. Kim and C.H. Kim 309
SESSION 5. FARMING SYSTEMS
Potential for systems simulation in farming systems research?
J.B. Dent 325
vii
Making farming systems a more objective and quantitative research
tool
L. Stroosnijder and T. van Rheenen 341
Options for agricultural development: a new quantitative approach
H. van Keulen 355
Options for agricultural development: a case study for Mali's fifth
Region
H. van Keulen and F.R. Veeneklaas 367
Multicriteria optimization for a sustainable agriculture
E.C. Alocilja and J.T. Ritchie 381
Simulation of multiple cropping systems with CropSys
R.M. Caldwell and J.W. Hansen 397
Optimization of cropping patterns in tank irrigation systems in Tamil
Nadu, India
K. Palanisami 413
Agricultural development in Thailand
N. Chomchalow 427
A methodological framework to explore long-term options for land
use
H.C. van Latesteijn 445
SESSION 6. EDUCATION, TRAINING AND
TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER
Decision support systems for agricultural development
J.W. Jones 459
Constraints in technology transfer: a user's perspective with a focus
on IPM, Philippines
T .H. Stuart 473
Postgraduate education in agricultural systems: the AIT experience
J .A. Gartner 485
The IBSNAT project
G. Uehara and G.Y. Tsuji 505
Building capacity for systems research at national agricultural research
centres: SARP's experience
H.F.M. ten Berge 515
Subject index 539
Preface
The symposium
In the next decades, agriculture will have to cope with an ever-increasing demand
for food and raw basic materials on the one hand, and with the necessity to use
resources without further degrading or exhausting the environment on the other
hand, and all this within a dynamic framework of social and economic
conditions. Intensification, sustainability, optimizing scarce resources, and
climate change are among the key issues. Organized thinking about future
farming requires forecasting of consequences of alternative ways to farm and to
develop agriculture. The complexity of the problems calls for a systematic
approach in which many disciplines are integrated. Systems thinking and
systems simulation are therefore indispensable tools for such endeavours.
About 150 scientists and senior research leaders participated in the
symposium 'Systems Approaches for Agricultural Development' (SAAD) at the
Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Bangkok, Thailand, in December 1991.
The symposium had the following objectives:
- to review the status of systems research and modeling in agriculture, with
special reference to evaluating their efficacy and efficiency in achieving
research goals, and to their application in developing countries;
- to promote international cooperation in modeling, and increase awareness of
systems research and simulation.
The symposium consisted of plenary sessions with reviews of major areas in
systems approaches in agriculture, plus presentations in two concurrent sessions
on technical topics of systems research. Subjects of studies were from tropical
and temperate countries.
The plenary sessions with eight invited presentations were aimed at senior
research leaders. These broad papers dealt with (i) agricultural research, (ii)
education, training and technology transfer, (iii) agricultural policy and (iv)
practical applications. These contributions, plus five review papers from
technical sessions, are published in three special issues of the journal
Agricultural Systems (1992).
The second group of presentations was aimed at systems scientists. Half of
the 36 contributions were invited papers, half were selected. In five sessions, they
dealt with the following features: (i) crop production under genotypic
ix
x
constraints, (ii) crop production under weather-related constraints, (iii) crop
production with soil constraints, (iv) crop production with biological
constraints; farming systems (v). A separate session (vi) dealt with training
and technology transfer. These contributions form the contents of this book.
There are five papers in the first session, five in the second, five in the third, three
in the fourth, nine in the fifth and five in the last session. All papers were
reviewed.
The models presented in the first four of the technical sessions are generally
mechanistic, explanatory and process-based, often with a one-day time interval
of integration and simulate a single, cropped field. They are particularly suited
for research and research applications. As there are many valid goals for systems
research, many models are possible, and a discussion of which one is 'best' is
futile. Several of the 'farming systems' papers explore the possibility of
combining agrotechnical models with socio-economic considerations; they
demonstrate that this integration is still in an early stage. In the 'training and
technology transfer' session, one might note the contrast between the IBSNAT
approach that emphasizes development of tools for predictive purposes, and the
SARP-approach that emphasizes trainee's understanding of the mechanisms
involved. They reflect the extremes of the range of modeling skills mentioned by
Spedding in 'The study of Agricultural Systems': operate, repair, improve,
construct models.
Systems research
Where systems research is often thought of as computer work, and personal
computers have become a very visible tool for research and planning in all
countries, a symposium on systems research may appear to result from that
technological development. Indeed, much of the work presented here is carried
on a wave of new technology. However important and fascinating these new toys
are, their presentation was not the key issue of SAAD.
SAAD's key issues were the need to think about entire agricultural
production systems, the observation that optimizing subsystems has lead to
unsustainable agriculture, and the recognition that improving agricultural
systems implies satisfying several, partially conflicting goals.
The real world is complex, and to think about it and handle it, we must divide
it into parts. In our science, large parts are 'systems', that can often be divided
into several 'subsystems'. We use the term 'system' for 'a part of the real world
with many interacting components and processes, but with few interactions with
the environment'.
Systems Research comprises an analytic and a synthetic phase. The tool
Systems Analysis has been around for a while. It guides us to identify systems,
subsystems and key processes. By taking systems analysis very far, one can
dissect systems and identify relevant research problems at a disciplinary level. In
this manner, systems analysis guides us to optimize our often traditionally
xi
approach of monodisciplinary research, and to derive conclusions and
recommendations. Model building is the inverse of the analysis. Since systems
are not just conglomerates of subsystems, special attention is given to the
interactions of susbsystems. Only for subsystems without feedback, an
optimum system is obtained by putting together optimized subsystems. But this
is rare in agriculture. We must, therefore, look at the entire system and not stop
at subsystems. Reaching an optimum for one or two subsystems, in fact, might
be counterproductive for the total.
Two examples illustrate initially promising developments, based on optimized
subsystems, that turned wrong at the systems level: (i) Elimination of insect pests
with insecticides initially appeared attractive: all bugs could be killed so that
yield loss would be history. We know now that this was short-sighted: natural
enemies get killed as well, so that previously harmless insects can become new
pests; persistent pesticides accumulate in soil, groundwater, ecological food
chains, farmers, and are a serious problem. Killing all insect pests was an
optimum solution in a too narrowly defined system. We are starting to learn that
insect ecology is part of the agricultural system, as is the soil, the groundwater
and the fauna. (ii) Too narrow a focus at fertilizer use efficiency has lead to
practices of applying fertilizer at high levels where the response of the crop is
small (but economically still positive), but with emissions of large quantities of
nutrients to the environment. Pollution of ground and surface water has become
a world-wide problem.
There are many examples of subsystems optimization leading to
malfunctioning of the entire system of agricultural production. These subsystem
optimizations make the entire production system look good for some time, but
then the total becomes unsustainable. Indeed, sustainability requires systems
research. We hope that this volume of SAAD papers will make you more aware
of the point that one should not look too narrowly at problems, and that
agricultural production and land use have many features that should be studied
together.
There is also another emerging feature that has lead to SAAD: the possibility
to handle quantitatively the common knowledge that yield is generally only one
objective out of many. Farming can have several goals such as yield and yield
stability, income, product diversity, an attractive landscape. Governments have
goals regarding water and fertilizer use, absence of pollution, employment. In
any system of crop production, all goals are reached at a certain level. We could
not compare these goals and their implications objectively and quantitatively, or
indicate how the degree of realization of goals can be traded, so that the full
systems view was lacking. New developments make this possible, thereby
opening ways to define and explore explicitly alternative options for the
development of agriculture.