Achieving critical mass for the greening of rice fallows in Odisha
- From
-
Published on
16.04.24
- Impact Area

Growing pulses and oilseeds crops in rice fallows provide farmers with additional income, livelihood opportunities, and food and nutrition security. (Photo: IRRI India)
CGIAR centers are collaborating with the Department of Farmers’ Empowerment of Odisha to bring rice fallows into cultivation under the Comprehensive Rice Fallow Management Project.
In the past two decades, Odisha has demonstrated remarkable resilience to droughts, cyclones, and floods. The state has achieved surplus paddy production thanks to timely and effective government actions such as improving irrigation facilities and promoting stress-tolerant crop varieties and climate-smart crop establishment methods like direct-seeded rice (DSR).
Odisha has 6.15 million hectares (ha) of agricultural land and over half is under paddy cultivation. However, following the kharif rice crop, a significant portion of land remains fallow during the rabi season.
Farmers in the coastal districts of Puri, Jagatsinghpur, and Jajpur and the irrigated belts in Sambalpur, Bargarh, and parts of Koraput and Kalahandi can grow green gram, black gram, chickpea, lentils, mustard, sunflower, sesame, and others crops during the rabi season.
But this is not the case in the uplands and medium lands in western and southern Odisha where farmers cannot grow a second crop because the soil is too dry. The opposite is true in the state’s lowlands coastal areas where the soil is too wet after the rice harvest preventing farmers from growing rabi crops.
Other factors compel farmers to plant only rice crops. Cultivating long-duration rice varieties that take around five months before they can be harvested gives them little time to plant another crop.
The shortage of agricultural workers is another issue because traditional planting methods are labor-intensive. Insufficient irrigation, open livestock grazing after rice harvest, and fragmented land holdings limit farmers’ opportunities to grow a second crop.
Related news
-
Infinite Leadership and Market Intelligence in CGIAR Breeding
CGIAR Initiative on Market Intelligence20.10.25-
Food security
Matty Demont (IRRI), Berber Kramer (IFPRI), Robert Andrade (Alliance Bioversity-CIAT), Melanie Conno…
Read more -
-
World Food Day 16 October: A Hungry World Knows No Borders
International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT)16.10.25-
Food security
-
Poverty reduction, livelihoods & jobs
When crops fail, people move not by choice, but by necessity. As families are displaced…
Read more -
-
Road to Belém: Scaling biosolutions for soil health and climate action gains momentum ahead of COP30
Multifunctional Landscapes Science Program15.10.25-
Adaptation
-
Biodiversity
-
Climate adaptation & mitigation
-
Environmental health & biodiversity
-
Mitigation
More than 40% of the world’s cultivated land is degraded, affecting more than three billion…
Read more -