Research Approach
Learning from China's long experience with sustainable agriculture
For centuries, farmers sustained high rice yields (4
metric tonnes per hectare) in the rice/wheat double cropping systems
of China's Tai Lake Region using
only 100 kg of N per hectare per year (Ellis
and Wang 1997). Current annual paddy N inputs exceed 500 kg
N per hectare and nitrate pollution and eutrophication are now common
in the Region (Ma, 1997).
To test the hypothesis that the region's
ecologically sustainable
traditional agroecosystems recycled
more nutrients than modern systems under the same environmental conditions,
we compare nitrogen cycling in
village-scale ecosystems under
traditional and contemporary
management. Side by side comparisons of
traditional and modern agroecosystems
are rarely possible because agriculturally productive areas usually
modernize before marginal areas. We therefore compare contemporary
and traditional (circa 1930) village-scale nitrogen cycling by integrating
household and landscape data collected on-site from 1993 to 1996 with
historical data from reference materials and village elder interviews
in a typical floodplain village of the region (Ellis
et al. 2000a,
Ellis et al. 2000b).