Harvesting value from crop and forest residues

After harvest, many crops produce residues on the farm that cannot be used as mulch or animal feed. The presence of these residues can often impede the growth of the next crop. Farmers typically only have a short window of at most 15 days to clear the residues such as rice straw or maize husks in order to begin preparing the land for the next planting.

So far, the fastest and cheapest way to address residue removal is simply by setting it on fire in the field, which is widely practiced in many emerging economies such as India. However, burning residues has been attributed to air pollution that affects the respiratory health not only of the local farming communities, but also of nearby urban centers such as Delhi (Subramanian, 2016). Recent studies have estimated that this leads to as many as 1 in 8 deaths in countries such as India, and reduces the affected population’s life expectancy by around 5.3 years (Balakrishnan et al., 2018). Therefore, many local governments have begun clamping down on open-air residue burning, sometimes going as far as fining the farmers.

However, from the perspective of farmers, there is no feasible alternative to open-air residue burning. Many farmers we have interviewed have even offered to pay around INR 1000/acre (around 3 labor-days/acre) to have balers or middlemen remove their residues in a timely manner from the field, but they have not found willing takers (Mohan, 2018). The reality is that crop residues are loose, wet, bulky, and geographically distributed, which make them very costly (more than INR 1000/acre) to collect and transport, either to a disposal site or to a centralized facility for subsequent conversion into fuel, fertilizer, or other chemicals.

In India, around 4 crore farmers regularly plant crop varieties such that yield 20 crore tons/year of in-field residues after harvest without immediate economic benefit. In the world, there are about 17 crore similar farmers. In total, there are around 85 crore tons/year of crop-related residues being burned or wasted worldwide. Assuming that a INR 2500/ton value could be created out of these residues rather than being burned (consistent with residue prices in proximity to industrial boilers), this could mean an additional income opportunity of around INR 50000 crore/year for these farmers in India.