A soil scientist through and through

His solemn demeanor may seem intimidating at first, but once the towering scientist speaks softly with his clear voice and organized thoughts, it is as though you are listening to your favorite college professor. He is Dr. Roland Buresh, a senior soil scientist at IRRI.

Dr. Buresh is the leader of the IRRC Work Group on Productivity and Sustainability, a task that demands a great deal of his time. He also handles the long-term experiments at IRRI, which he enjoys a lot since he is constantly learning from them. In addition to those, he leads a project across several Asian countries on managing crop residues and has responsibilities in the IRRI-CIMMYT alliance on intensive systems.

When one hears the name Dr. Buresh, it is most likely that the term “site-specific nutrient management” or SSNM is not far from turning up. Says Dr. Buresh: “In the area of crop and resource management, it’s one of the things that we can say is really developed, formulated, and evaluated through IRRI and partnership with national agricultural research and extension systems. Without IRRI, site-specific nutrient management for rice would not exist, whereas many other technologies on crop and resource management would exist in some form, even if IRRI did not get involved. But site-specific nutrient management for rice is something that, without IRRI, and IRRI’s involvement in the conceptualization, would not be here today.”

At the same time, he believes that SSNM is where it is today because of partnerships with the national programs. He feels strongly about SSNM because “it provides a set of principles on nutrient management and an approach to nutrient management that’s really applicable across all lowland rice-growing areas, in any place in the world.” He calls SSNM an international public good and believes that if people understand the principles of SSNM, this could change the way people think about nutrient management. In the future, he hopes that this breakthrough can be read in textbooks so the next generation of agricultural workers can benefit from it.

At the moment, the first challenge he faces is to influence the scientific community. He and his colleagues have given much effort over the last 2 years by getting out publications and launching the SSNM Web site (www.irri.org./irrc/ssnm). The second step is to reach the technical people in national programs at the local level who can act as messengers
between scientists and farmers.

Even with so many things keeping him busy, Dr. Buresh certainly has no lack of other interests. “There are so many interesting things in life and so many interesting things to do; my task is to limit my interests to get the job done,” he shares with a smile. Dr. Buresh has worked on other crops on other continents, including agroforestry, and, surprisingly, he had very diverse majors in college. While his undergraduate major was in chemistry and his master’s degree was in soil science, his PhD was in marine sciences, a far leap from the two.

Another thing that most people would probably not know about Dr. Buresh is that he actually grew up on a farm and worked for farmers to earn money to go to college. He has driven a grain truck and a combine harvester to harvest wheat, custom-sprayed herbicides for grains, and, yes, even milked a lot of cows. And he is thankful for all his practical experiences. “A lot of what I know about agriculture is from my personal experience, growing up on a farm and working for farmers when I was in college,” he reveals. “That helped me very much, giving me a practical background, and giving me an idea of some of the ways farmers think and process information.”

So does this busy soil scientist ever relax? Yes, as a matter of fact, he does. He enjoys jogging and would have played more softball and basketball if he had had more leisure time. He was also lucky to have shared a unique Asian cultural experience with his wife and daughter in Hue, Vietnam, the first place he showed his family outside the Philippines.

In the meantime, he would like to better understand the issues of sustainability in the future. He hopes that, in 2–3 years, the work group will come up with a plant canopy– or plant type–based management of rice that will work anywhere in Asia, providing a set of principles that could be applied in any part of the rice-producing world.

Trina Mendoza (t.mendoza@cgiar.org)
 

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