My Twin Magnificent Obsessions – (2) Automatic Organic Rotavator As My Technological Contribution To Regenerative Agriculture

Should not Filipino farmers learn from India, where the rotavator is now the most used implement for farming? ANN says (Author Not Named, 16 Aug 2023, “Why Rotavator Is The Most Used Implement For Farming In India?” Tractor Karvan, tractorkarvan.com). And so we go to India and read “Why Some Inferior Technologies Succeed? Examining The Diffusion And Impacts Of Rotavator Tillage In Nepal Terai” authored by G Paudel, V Krishna, A McDonald & Vijesh Vijaya Krishna (Ideas, ideas.repec.org). 
(“Rotavator” from knowledgebank.irri.org), “Mulch” from dreamstime.com)

G Paudel et al say:

Rotavator is a tractor-operated cultivating implement for shallow tillage, which operates by pulverizing soil with the help of rotating L or J -shaped blades. Rotavator tillage has been spreading rapidly in many parts of South Asia, despite having a large body of evidence on its negative consequences on soil quality and crop yield from the experimental research trials.

Ah! I Filipino agriculturist – BSA major in Ag Edu 1965, UP Los Baños; 2001-2008 Editor In Chief of the Philippine Journal of Crop Science (PJCS) – I believe G Paudel et al when they say that on rotavator tillage, the evidence is that it has “negative consequences on soil quality and crop yield.”

More than 5 years ago, 26 March 2018, I wrote “Organic Farming & The Lesson Of The Rotavator: How To Feed The World” (Organic Country, blogspot.com), where I quote Tania Lewis & Emily Potter describing Edward Faulkner’s concept thus (books.google.com.ph):

Faulkner's conception of trash farming saw soil as a living system of capillaries. When conventional plows are used, the soil mass is violently broken apart, disrupting the capillary connections through which water seeps. Faulkner's answer was taken from Asian farming practices. Eschewing the plough, he recommended disc-rotoring the crop residue, or trash, into the soil. The result was a "trashy" surface soil scattered with debris and "teeming with organic matter" (Beeman 1992: 96).

Today, when farmers in India, the Philippines and US of A operate the rotavator, they fail to create a trashy surface and instead destroy the structure of the soil and not enrich it!

If operated like I know how, the rotavator creates that trash mulch over the soil surface automatically. That is why I am writing this to attract any investor – I’m looking at the PH hybrid rice companies – for us to reinvent the rotavator so that it cuts the soil and produce the trash mulch (soil & weeds cut & mixed) automatically and spread that material all over the field automatically! The automatic “Organic Rotavator” I call it.

I am thinking of some PhP2 million to produce that reinvented rotavator, with techno demos done in Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao. I’m calling on Bayer AG, LongPing, Pioneer Hybrid, SL Agritech and Syngenta, any or all of them coming together, to support the project I now call “Automatic Organic Rotavator” where even a novice farmer or non-farmer can operate the machine and still automatically produce a trash mulch all over and immediately begin to fertilize the whole field! Any takers?@517