Photo courtesy Proximity Designs

Member: Proximity Designs

Project Location: Delta agro-ecological region in Lower Myanmar 

Size: 2,500 farmers who own and manage more than 5,000 hectares of rice-growing land

Type of intervention: Sustainable agriculture; rice cultivation

Proximity Design has developed a regenerative, no-burn crop residue management solution to meet farmers’ needs. By applying a microbial solution, instead of pursuing traditional crop residue burning practices, farmers can process crop residues quickly while improving soil health and avoiding harmful emissions. 

The project was designed to assess the feasibility of quantifying and verifying the reduction in CO2 emissions resulting from rice farmers’ transition to no-burn rice straw farming. Establishing an MRV system is crucial to demonstrating the viability of this regenerative farming approach and promoting its eligibility for carbon market financing.

Proximity is conducting a feasibility study to assess the viability and associated costs of measuring and verifying reductions in CO2 emissions from the adoption of the no-burn rice straw practice by smallholder farmers in Myanmar. Key pre-feasibilty activities planned include:

1. Mapping GPS coordinates of the plots where farmers have adopted the no-burn practice.
2. Developing data models to estimate the boundaries of farmers’ plots.
3. Accessing historical and real-time satellite imagery of farmers’ plots.
4. Developing models to estimate the emissions avoided and subsequently reduced through adopting the no-burn practice.
5. Consulting with experts in carbon emission verification to determine the data and evidence requirements.
6. Conducting a thorough analysis of the costs and manpower needed to carry out the activities on a per-farmer basis.

Current Project Status

The project commenced in early 2024. The Proximity team has completed the construction of a burn detection model based on 600 farm plots, each of which had to be manually annotated and verified to assess recent burning and tillage. The project uses open-source satellite images to run the model, which has an 85% accuracy. It has cost roughly USD 15 per farmer to get GPS points of discrete plots and conduct surveys to validate farm practices in situ. 

The team is now in an intense phase of communicating with farmers. The process is designed to develop a clear value proposition for farmers and identify factors that can increase commitment to a project that would run over 20 years in which the first payments will only accrue up to two years after implementation/adoption. The team is also collecting information on the costs, time, and effort required to onboard farmers to the project and register them on Verra. The response from the farmers is encouraging, and the team is inundated with questions as farmers seek to understand carbon credits better.  

Overall context

In Lower Myanmar, over 300,000 rice farmers rely on double-cropping rice-rice or pulses-rice crop rotations to sustain their livelihoods. Supporting an average household size of five individuals, smallholder farms typically generate approximately USD 1,600 of income per year. Farmers burn crop residue in open fields in May and November to clear the land for the subsequent growing season.

Agricultural burning is a regional challenge across South and South East Asia. Burning seasons result in lockdowns and increased respiratory hospitalizations due to severe pollution. At an aggregate level, rice cultivation accounts for 10% of agricultural GHG emissions and a third of all black carbon emissions. For smallholders, this method of crop residue management is the most prevalent and convenient and is often their sole option for quickly preparing their land for the next cropping cycle.

This practice releases an estimated 7 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year in tandem with dangerous levels of PM 2.5 particles which pose serious health risks to communities. Open burning is also detrimental to farmers’ natural endowment over time. Repeated seasonal burning degrades organic matter in the soil, undermining the stimulation of microbial growth integral for maintaining soil fertility. In time, this contributes to declining crop yields and increased dependence on expensive chemical fertilizers.

The overarching aim of proliferating Proximity’s no-burn rice practice is to enhance the incomes of low-income smallholder farmers. Proximity’s practice has demonstrated its capacity to improve farm profitability. It is expected that improved soil health will contribute further to enhancing agricultural productivity and offsetting dependence on fertilizers, in the medium term.

Proximity anticipates that adopters of no-burn rice farming will constitute 20% of its customer base by 2026, with significant potential for replication beyond Myanmar. Developing and demonstrating the practice’s carbon potential and the utility of using Proximity’s microbial solution formulation as a substitute for residue burning is a priority.