Manurial amendments and source of water for supplemental irrigation of sawah-rice system influenced soil quality and rice yield

Abstract

Soil and water management research on adapting the promising sawah ecotechnology for lowland rice farming in West Africa has largely focused on the abundant inland valleys; floodplains which too represent a huge agricultural resource in the region have not been so involved. Sawah refers to a bunded, puddled and leveled basin for rice, with water inlets and outlets for irrigation and drainage, respectively. In conventional sawah, soil fertility is augmented using mineral fertilizers, with an option to harness lowland water resources for use in small-scale irrigation to create the so-called sawah typologies. In this study, we evaluated the effects of three manurial amendments (rice husk, rice-husk ash and poultry droppings, each at 10 t ha^–1) and NPK 20:10:10 at 400 kg ha^–1 interacting with source of water (spring or pond) used for supplemental irrigation of three sawah typologies in a floodplain in southeastern Nigeria. Plots amended with poultry droppings and supplemented with spring water recorded the overall best performance of the sawah-rice system; the control being the unamended non-supplemented (solely rainfed) plots recorded the worst. Rice-husk ash and rice husk enhanced soil pH and soil organic carbon, respectively. The three sawah typologies showed a consistent trend thus spring-supplemented ≥ pond-supplemented ≥ non-supplemented sawah. Rice grain yield was influenced by soil total nitrogen and the sum of the three plant-nutrient basic cations (K⁺ , Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺), with the influence of K⁺ alone being the greatest. To enhance rice performance including grain yields in floodplain sawah, farmers should utilise poultry droppings as soil manure and spring water for supplemental irrigation.