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Especially for smaller farms, the investment costs of these technologies may be prohibitive. Municipalities could therefore procure them and rent them to farmers at a subsidized price or provide them without charge, as was done in India (DA&FW 2018). In Morocco, the World Bank supported a project, the “Plan Maroc Vert,” which introduced such technologies in a bid to increase efficiency and reduce burning in the agriculture sector (World Bank 2014).
Raising Awareness Raising awareness about air pollution and the damage it does is important and increases the demand for cleaner air. To effectively tackle the
BOX 3.15
Reusing Crop Residues as Fertilizer with the Happy Seeder The Happy Seeder is an agricultural device that cuts crop residues, sows seeds into the soil, and deposits the sown crop residues over the area with the sown seeds as a natural fertilizer. By recycling crop residues in this way, farmers have less incentive to burn them, and stubble burning is reduced. The environmental and economic effects of a range of in situ management practices were assessed in India, and the Happy Seeder was associated with the largest potential of reducing air pollution caused by burning stubbles. Use of the Happy Seeder instead of burning would reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by more than 78 percent. This would significantly reduce agriculture’s contribution to overall GHG emissions in India and lower social costs in terms of particulate air pollution (Shyamsundar et al. 2019). Systems using technology like the Happy Seeder can improve profits by 10–20 percent compared with farming practices involving burning. The higher profits stem
from slightly higher yields and lower input costs for land preparation (Shyamsundar et al. 2019). This investigation shows the potential to gain air quality while simultaneously enhancing economic profits for farmers using innovative technologies like the Happy Seeder, and one of the authors stresses the potential for scaling up the adoption of such programs (CIMMYT 2019). The Indian government has substantially increased subsidies for the in situ residue management (DA&FW 2018) and provides needed tools such as the Happy Seeder at low costs to farmers in an attempt to combat agricultural fires at the end of the harvesting season. With the scheme, which involves subsidies amounting to US$75 million, farms making up a total area of around 0.8 million hectares have been able to use the Happy Seeder technology in northwestern states of India. Scaling up the figures, it is estimated that direct farmer benefits amounted to US$131 million within one year.
