Bangladesh survives, more than anything else, on rice, and it's a hard way to live. The country is about the size of Iowa, except that Iowa has 3.2 million people and Bangladesh has 169 million. As climate change makes weather extremes more common, the food supply has become more precarious. Especially difficult are the dry months—roughly from November through May—before the monsoon rains begin, when farmers need to irrigate their crops with water pumped from aquifers and rivers.
The practice is unsustainable. Farmers pump more water than the monsoon can replenish, and they do it with diesel engines—more than a million of them—which generate carbon dioxide and add to other types of air pollution as well.
"I don't know about you, but toiling in the sun, I'm humbled by what the farmers do to keep us fed everywhere in the world," says Faisal Hossain, a hydrologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is also leader of IRAS, a project begun in 2020 to protect Bangladesh and its food supply that is already producing results.
IRAS is short for Integrated Rice Advisory System, a collaboration between Bangladesh's agriculture ministry, the University of Washington and Earth-observing satellite programs from NASA and other agencies. The satellites beam data on how much water the farmers are using to computers on the ground, which compare the readings to what is optimal for maximizing the yield of crops. Then the government sends advisories to farmers via radio, newspapers, social media—and, thanks to IRAS, text messages on their cellphones.
The text messages are particularly useful to farmers because they are so accessible. Not only can farmers read them on phones wherever they happen to be, but the messages are also customized to fit local needs. For instance, some texts may recommend farmers "apply half a finger" of water to a crop because "four centimeters" isn't always a practical measurement to make in the field.
"We put it all together and we can create an advisory like, 'Hey, farmer John, you can just go easy,' or, 'Yeah, you actually need to irrigate your crops,'" Hossain told Newsweek. "These are very unique based on the farmer's location and what they're growing."
In 2021, a year after the program's introduction, IRAS followed up with a study of 1,000 farmers. Those who used the text-message advisories irrigated their fields 32 percent less than other farmers who kept working as usual. Most said that they came out ahead because they didn't have to buy as much fuel or rent as many irrigation pumps, but still got just about the same crop yield.
Hossain grew up in Bangladesh. His father farmed as a boy until he changed course and got an education. "I used to have a lot of chats with him about how farming works in that part of the world," he says. "I just had a natural inclination to look at this whole thing from the farmer's lens and their lifestyle, rather than from the scientist's."
Bangladeshi farmers have been under increasing pressure. They need to grow more rice because the Bangladeshi population has tripled since the 1960s, but to grow their crops, they're draining the aquifers beneath them—and once the water is pumped to the surface, it starts to evaporate in the hot tropical sun. South Asia faces other serious problems with its food supply. Among other things, the rising Indian Ocean is making groundwater saltier, further threatening crop yields. Bangladeshi researchers have developed 140 strains of climate-resilient rice, but farmers seem uneasy about shifting from the two strains they've used for decades.
"We farmers are in real crisis," a farmer named Haji Noor Malik told Hossain in a video interview a few years ago. "If there is no water and the weather is hot, it burns the crop."
Hossain and his team had already helped start water-information programs in Pakistan and India when the Bangladeshi government asked for help four years ago in getting its advisories out to more farmers. In the past year, IRAS messages have reached 10 million farmers. (Overall, a total of 17 million families are involved in the country's food production, according to a 2019 agricultural census.) If IRAS can get its advisories out nationwide and extend the service to other water-intensive crops like sugarcane, Hossain estimates it could reduce farms' water waste by 30 percent, agricultural fuel consumption by 45 percent and carbon emissions by 300,000 tons per year.
"This is being done with free data, NASA data," says Hossain. "It's being made for the greater good of humanity. We make our tools freely accessible, but we want to make sure the word gets out."
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