How Do Rice Farming Nutrient Management Practices Affect Landscape Scale Nutrient Balances?.

There are a variety of “best management practices” that are recommended by different organizations or countries for managing nutrients in Asian rice cropping systems. There is a need to monitor and evaluate medium- and long-term landscape scale consequences of nutrient management decisions, in order to improve the sustainability of the best management practice recommendations and to improve the effectiveness of extension programs and environmental incentive mechanisms for farmers.   A number of research centers and environmental monitoring agencies have come together to design a system of farm-level and landscape-level data collection and evaluation for this purpose, initially focusing on Vietnam and Thailand. The system will be described and analysis of past data will be presented to provide baseline data for new extension and incentive programs.