Seen from a little distance, it is a surprising sight. Across a wide field the green Aman rice is still swaying in the breeze, and farmers will need another month or so before it ripens and can be brought home. But in the middle of the field one plot has turned completely yellow and ripe, and the farmer will cut it within a day or two. How is that possible?

That was the scene recently in Pirganj village in Mymensingh Sadar upazila. Farmer Md Abu Sayeed told Ittefaq that this is BINA-11, an early Aman variety. From raising seedlings to harvesting, it takes at most 110 days. The seedlings take 20 to 22 days, so leaving that time aside the crop needs 90 days in the field, a month less than other Aman varieties. Pointing to his ripe crop, he said: "I will cut this rice and bring it home within a day or two."

Another farmer, Abu Bakar Siddique, said the same. Being a high-yielding variety, BINA-11 gives four to five maunds more per bigha than other Aman varieties, he said. The grain is long and medium, and it fetches a good price. Its special quality, though, is that floods cannot do it much harm: the plants survive even when submerged.

The Bangladesh Institute of Nuclear Agriculture (BINA) says that every year waterlogging and floods caused by heavy rain damage rice on 20 lakh hectares of land in one way or another. This year floods destroyed Aman crops on more than 50,000 hectares, and last year on more than 1 lakh hectares, hurting the country's overall crop production. Growing the early variety BINA-11 could have protected much of this crop, the institute says.

According to the government research institute, even if seedlings in the seedbed, or two to three days after transplanting, are submerged for 20 to 25 days and their upper parts rot, the plants grow back and give a normal yield. Under submergence the variety yields 4.5 to 5 tonnes a hectare, and without submergence 6 to 6.5 tonnes. Its short life cycle also makes it easy to raise cropping intensity. The area under this early Aman has been growing steadily over the past few years, the institute said.

BINA director general Dr Mirza Mofazzal Islam, who developed the variety, told Ittefaq yesterday that because earlier Aman varieties had a long life cycle, farmers in the north and other regions could not grow more than two crops a year. With the short-duration BINA-11, farmers can easily grow three crops a year on the same land.

A farmer can grow mustard, jute greens or another Rabi crop after the early Aman and then grow Boro, he said. By growing such short-duration varieties, farmers in the Barind region and elsewhere have already turned double-cropped land into triple-cropped land.

The BINA director general said this rice is harvested from the end of the Bengali month of Ashwin, so its straw meets the demand for cattle feed at that time, and farmers can earn extra income by selling the straw. More than 1,000 field demonstrations are now being held across the country to spread BINA-11 among farmers, he said.

Source: Ittefaq. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.