What Are The Two Most Crucial Challenges For Organic Rice Production?

The two challenges that are immensely crucial to the organic production of rice are weed control and soil fertilitly. The practices that provide support in effective weed control are inclusive of crop rotations, land levelling, seed-bed preparation, rotary hoeing and water management. In order to reduce weed pressure, the conventional two-year rice/soybean rotation is elongated to one more year transforming the rice/soybean rotation period to three years.  As a result, crops like sorghum, wheat, corn etc are obtained. The purpose of this elongation was to empower some extra time for the weed life cycles to break and also reduce the number of weed seeds present in the soil. There are other options too for weed control such as the use of field-flooding that will suppress weeds directly and would even give the crop a competitive advantage. As for the maintainence of soil fertility, it could be accomplished by a combinatin of crop rotation by using deep-rooted legume crops or cover crops and enable the application of rock minerals, composts, animal manures and other organic changes.