SRI: The Alternative and Regenerative Method of Rice Cultivation You May Have Never Heard Of

Rice is the “principal [food] staple” for at least half the world’s population —that’s according to the director general of the International Rice Research Institute. It is so prevalent as a food and in cultures, including for ceremonial uses, that in Southeast Asia, for example, “have you eaten/had rice today/yet?” is a common greeting. Because rice "is so impactful,” popular and visionary US brand Lotus Foods, uses the phrase Rice Is Life ® on its packaging.  

“More people derive their livelihood from rice than anything else that human beings do on planet earth,” Lotus Foods Co-Founder Ken Lee recently told Justine Reichman, the Founder of NextGen Purpose and host of its Essential Ingredients podcast. The statistics bear him out. According to the UN, “approximately one-fifth of the world’s population, more than one billion people, depend on rice cultivation for their livelihood.”  Worldwide, “[i]n crop year 2023, there were around 168 million hectares of rice-cultivated area.” By some measures, that’s equivalent to approximately 235 million football pitches/soccer fields being used for rice. The USDA says that in 2023/24, worldwide rice production was 522.08 million metric tons and that increased by 3% for 2024/25. But, as the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Lead Food Scientist Brent Loken, the BBC, and Lotus Foods explain, conventional methods of growing all that rice pose environmental, economic, and health challenges.

Negatives of Conventional Rice Cultivation Methods

In his recent Ted-Ed You Tube video, Can We Create the “Perfect” Farm?, which Asia’s regenerative agriculture champion Zero Foodprint Asia recently shared on LinkedIn ,  Loken reports that more than 90 percent of the world’s rice is grown in continuously flooded paddies. As he explains, and as the BBC’s podcast The Food Chain also discusses in its January 2025 episode, Should We Eat Less Rice?, continuously flooded paddies lead to methane emissions, because the low oxygen environment of the flooded paddies supports anaerobic microorganisms that produce methane. Director General of the International Rice Research Institute Dr. Yvonne Pinto told the BBC, rice production is responsible for 10 percent of all agricultural methane emissions. In a 2024 article, the UN’s Food Agency said that rice cultivation produces “GHGs [greenhouse gas emissions, the largest of which is methane] comparable to those of the aviation sector.”

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"Rice Learned to Survive in Water. It Doesn't Thrive in Water."

Lotus Foods Co-Founders Caryl Levine and Ken Lee on the Essential Ingredients podcast

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In the Should We Eat Less Rice? podcast episode, the managing director of British brand Tilda Rice, Jean-Philippe Laborde, describes rice as a “very thirsty plant.” In metric terms, he said rice “consumes between 3,000 to 5,000 litres per kilogram of rice grown.” In imperial terms, according to Lotus Foods, which is a certified B Corp, the conventional method of growing rice in continuously flooded fields uses 360 to 600 gallons of water per pound of rice. As Lotus Foods’ Ken Lee put it in an interview he gave at the 2017 Natural Products Expo West, “almost one-third of earth’s potable water is used to grow rice on planet earth.”

The Lotus Foods website explains that not only do continuously flooded fields have a negative environmental impact, they also limit opportunities for farmers to grow alternative crops and thus they reduce “livelihood options.”

Conventional rice farming poses particular health challenges for the more than 500 million women and girls who supply between 50 and 90 percent of “labor in growing the world’s rice crop,” explains Olivia Vent the former Communications Director of Cornell University’s International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development, in an essay on the Lotus Foods website. “Worldwide there are more women engaged in growing rice than any other livelihood activity,” she adds. They spend hours standing bent over in rice paddies or sitting in the water “sorting rice seedlings out for eight hours a day," which by one estimate means "women spend four to five hundred hours in [these] positions to cultivate one acre of rice."

In addition to the obvious orthopedic issues, the Lotus Food website shares that working in continuously flooded fields puts women and girls at risk for “skin ailments, gynecological issues, and exposure to water-borne illnesses.” In the Essential Ingredients podcast interview, Lotus co-founder Caryl Levine says that because of insects, rice paddies are a disease vector for malaria. Additionally, as Lotus Foods and Olivia Vent explain, women and girls working in the flooded paddies are exposed to agrochemicals used for fertilization and pest control. Because of body composition differences between men and women, these chemicals pose a greater threat to the women and girls.

SRI Solutions and Benefits

An alternative cultivation method, known as the System of Rice Intensification, offers solutions that result in reduced methane production/better aerobic conditions, improved yields, improved nutritional values (including higher amounts of iron, zinc, copper and manganese and lower amounts of heavy metals like arsenic), improved soil conditions, and better working conditions.

SRI has been around for about 40 years, has been studied extensively for at least 20 years, and as of 2023, was used in at least 60 countries. SRI originated in Madagascar. A French Jesuit priest Fr. Henri de Laulanié, who, since 1961, had been “working with Malagasy farmers to improve their agricultural systems and particularly their rice production” is credited with “synthesizing the method” in the 1980s.

Through a campaign it calls More Crop Per Drop®, American brand Lotus Foods, whose vision is to “change the way is grown around the world,” is championing the agroecological methods of SRI. As they shared on the Essential Ingredients podcast, Caryl Levine and her husband Ken Lee initially set out on their rice journey with the goal of “promoting rice biodiversity by working with small holder farmers from around the world who were growing rice sustainably.” They eventually became “pigmented [rice] pioneers.”  At a time when many in the US were familiar only with white rice varieties and even instant rice (Minute® Rice), they introduced US consumers and “high end” American chefs, including Thomas Keller of The French Laundry and Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, to heirloom varieties of a red rice from Bhutan and a black rice from China, which they trademarked as Forbidden Rice®.

In 2005, Caryl and Ken learned about SRI from Olivia Vent and about two years later they began partnering with farms that use SRI. Their journey continued in 2019 when, as they said on the podcast, working together with the Regenerative Organic Alliance, they were able to verify their belief that SRI “[is] inherently regenerative.”

As the Lotus Foods website illustrates with wonderful graphics, SRI practices include planting local and young seedlings “in wide rows” to allow for more oxygen flow and “manual weeding,” which aerates the soil, in contrast to conventional methods of planting “random clumps of older seedlings.”  Similarly, rather than continuous flooding of the fields, SRI relies on the use of moist fields or alternating between drying and flooding the field. SRI also emphasizes building up the soil through the use of manure and organic matter rather than synthetic fertilizers and pest control.

Photo credit: PR Newswire story about Lotus Foods’ "Do the Rice Thing” Campaign

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“With SRI, women have many fewer and lighter seedings to plant, and they use a simple weeder that they push through the rows of rice in an upright, not a bent-over posture . . . they can get the work in the fields done faster and with less impact on their bodies." Lotus Foods Co-Founder Caryl Levine in a June 2024 interview.

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Nature is proving the truth of Caryl and Ken’s cleverly-phrased observation that, “rice learned to survive in water. It doesn’t thrive in water.” In a 2023 Agronomy article edited by Cornell University's internationally-renowned Professor Norman Uphoff. the authors, who performed a meta-analysis of 150 papers, explain that as of 2020, “[f]ield demonstrations in over 60 countries have validated the benefits of SRI over other cultivation methods in terms of yields (20-100% more), reduction in the quantity of seed required (90%) and saving of water (50%) as well as associated economic and social benefits.”  Additional environmental benefits of SRI are a reduction on average of 40% in methane gas emissions and improved soil health, including carbon sequestration, notes the Lotus Foods website.

As explained on Cornell University’s SRI website, which “contains the most comprehensive collection of information on the SRI globally,” a 2021 analysis of SRI cultivation methods used in an EU-Funded and Asian Institute of Technology-led multi-year project involving “more than 15,000 farmers . . . in 33 districts in 11 provinces in the Lower-Mekong- Basin [Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam],” also found demonstrably positive impacts. The analysis showed that “[a]verage rice yield increased by 52 percent, net economic returns were raised by 70%. Labor productivity increased by 64%; water productivity by 61%; and the efficiency of mineral fertilizer-use rose by 163%. The total energy input required for farming operations was decreased by 34%, while emissions of greenhouse gas were significantly reduced, by 14% with irrigated rice production, and by 17% per-hectare in rainfed cropping.”

Generally, SRI also improves rice’s pest resistance and lowers the “insect pests’ incidence.” In addition to the meta-analysis, the Agronomy article’s authors reviewed field experiments conducted over five years in eight locations by the All-India Coordinated Rice Improvement Project. The authors conclude, “[i]t was apparent that SRI practices establish a micro-environment in the crop canopy that is less conducive to the growth and multiplication of inspect pests. The effect of such an environment is complemented by SRI plants having higher silica content in leaves and stalks and a greater number of natural enemies in the plot. These factors lead to lower pest incidence and less crop loss in SRI.”

Some of the greatest social benefits of SRI are seen in the lives of women and girls working in rice cultivation. The agriculture method translates into “about 185 fewer working hours for women per season.” As Caryl explains in a June 2024 interview, “[w]ith SRI, women have many fewer and lighter seedings to plant, and they use a simple weeder that they push through the rows of rice in an upright, not a bent-over posture. So, they can get the work in the fields done faster and with less impact on their bodies.” Additionally, as Olivia Vent notes in her essay,  in some communities, because the weeder is considered a machine-like tool, men are willing to do that work, further freeing up women’s time. Because the paddies are not flooded continuously, women and girls are spending less time in the muddy water and thus are less at risk for skin ailments, water-borne diseases. and gynocological issues. The reduced incidence of pests and the emphasis on natural methods of control reduces exposure to chemicals.

Continue Your SRI and Regenerative Journey

Lotus Foods branded rice is all grown using SRI and carries the More Crop Per Drop® logo. You can buy Lotus Foods' SRI rice directly through their website and also in stores like Costco, Whole Foods, and Publix, as well as online through iHerb, including iHerb Hong Kong.

To continue your rice-oriented learning journey, read Olivia Vent’s excellent essay about the “feminization of agriculture” and how SRI can help. Also visit https://sri4women.org and https://www.sri-2030.org/what#what-is-sri.

You can explore the basics of regenerative agriculture in my recent article. To learn more about the three regenerative product certifications you are most likely to see on your grocery store shelves and on your device screens — ROC®, Land to Market®/Ecological Outcome Verified®, and Certified Regenefied®, please look for my upcoming article.