Sunday, February 24, 2008

Growing rice with the Mittleider method

Do you have any experience, or did Mr Mittleider have any experience
using his system to grow rice? Rice is cultivated in what is
essentially a huge grow bed,(often called a rice paddy) which is
flooded with water, rice seedlings are then planted in the flooded
paddy. Any thoughts on using the Mittleider system to increase yields?
I will be living in Thailand, and hope to find ways to apply the
Mittleider method to traditional gardening and farming techniques. If
you have some fertilizer formulas, can compute using a per acre
formula? I can then convert to the Thai unit of area the "rai" equal
to .396 acres. Thank you.

Ray and Group:

Dr. Mittleider did indeed have experience growing rice. Instead of transplanting seedlings in "wet paddy" growing he broadcast seed into a dry paddy and used the fertilizers with only 3 applications. He increased yields 5 times.

To get the per-acre amount of fertilizer you want to have 110# of actual nitrogen, 60# of actual phosphate, and 110# of Potash.