Farmers' perceptions on salinity and sodicity: a case study into farmer's knowledge of salinity and sodicity, and their strategies and practices to deal with salinity and sodicity in their farm systems.

This report describes the results of a case study carried out in Watercourse 14-R on the Fordwah distributary in January 1996. It is part of a broader study, entitled "Managing Irrigation for Environmentally Sustainable Agriculture in Pakistan". This is a study on farmers' perceptions on salinity and sodicity. Farmers can influence present salinity and sodicity levels through their farming and irrigation practices. It depends on farmers' knowledge of the salinity and sodicity levels through their farming and irrigation objectives, farming strategies, and internal and external constraints of the farming system, as to how a farmer will react to present salinity and sodicity levels or hazards. Only after farmers' perceptions, strategies, and practices related to salinity and sodicity are understood, and the relation between physical environment, farming system, and salinity/sodicity strategies and practices are revealed, will it be possible to anticipate or predict the direction of change in soil salinity and sodicity under different irrigation scenarios. The case study revealed that farmers have an excellent knowledge of the present salinity/sodicity situation. A first analysis of the indicators that farmers use to recognize salinity/sodicity phenomena suggested that farmers have a good set of physical and crop appearance indicators to recognize salinity and sodicity. Later analysis showed that what farmers refer to as a black appearance of the soil does not necessarily point to sodicity due to organic matter dispersion. The black soil appearance refers more likely to high salt and sodicity concentrations, since in these soils no crop growth is possible, in contrast to soils having white salts where crop growth is possible. Practices are directly linked to the salinity and sodicity strategies. Evalauting farmers' practices on the basis of the theoretical sequence of practices, showed that farmers follow the proposed theoretical sequence quite closely. This indicates that farmers make a good estimation of what is practically possible to be achieved on their farms, given the physical environment and the constraints set by their farming systems. In cases where several alternative practices could be used to achieve the same results, farmers act according to the constraints set by their farming system.