Management of soil physical properties of lowland puddled rice soil for sustainable food production

About 3 billion people who rely on rice as their staple food today will have multiplied to some 4.4 billion by the middle of this century. With rice demand growing at an average rate of about 3 percent annually, 70 percent more rice has to be produced in next 30 years compared to present day production levels. More rice has to come from less favorable environments, with less water and nutrients. Agricultural population densities on Asia's rice producing lands are among the highest in the world and continue to increase at a remarkable rate. Rice has widely adapted itself: to the hot Australian and Egyptian deserts, to the cool Himalayan foothills of Nepal. Hill tribes in Southeast Asia plant it on slash-and-burned forest slopes; that's upland rice. However, low lying areas in Asia, which are subject to uncontrolled flooding, are home to more than 100 million poor farmers. Puddling or wet tillage in rice, decreases total soil porosity only slightly, but markedly changes porosity distribution with both storage and residual porosity increasing at the expanse of transmission porosity. Soil texture plays an important role in soil water retention following soil disturbance. Cracking pattern of the soils is studied after six years of different levels of regular addition of residue. Cracking pattern at a soil surface affects the hydrodynamic properties of soil. Cracking extends the soil-air interface into the soil profile and thereby may increase the moisture loss through evaporation