Sharing Stories: Larry Rublee, India 55
Sunday, October 25, 2015 at 10:16PM I was in India 55 (village level food production) 1968-70, stationed in Tikamgarh District, MP. Randy Baxter, Jack Breen, and Rod Elkins were all in Tikamgarh District, though we were all about an hour’s bus ride apart from each other. I keep up with Randy and Jack. We’ve lost contact with Rod.
Munu Lal Tiwari (co-worker), Larry Rublee
India 55 was trained in Hemet, CA to introduce to local farmers to high-yielding varieties of Mexican wheat, developed by the Ford Foundation for arid climates. This was in support of India’s “green revolution”. Working with my agriculture extension co-worker (Munu Lal Tiwari) and the District Agriculture Department (my supervisor was Jai Dev Singh, Deputy Director of Agriculture), I realized that the farmers in my area were already using many of the practices we were there to promote. Farmers were planting high-yielding seed, requiring six times the amount of water over the older “dashi” seed. They were used to using bullock-driven buckets on a wheel to irrigate their fields. The new seeds required diesel pumps which were emptying the open wells in less than an hour and then recuperating over several days. Therefore, I decided to explore and implement a scheme to increase the water recuperation rate of the open wells. I spent my second year researching and writing proposals to US AID, Oxfam and other funding sources to buy the pneumatic drilling equipment for the project. We eventually got a demonstration set of equipment funded and after I left India, the District Agriculture Department implemented the scheme on a wider basis.
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Larry Rublee
October 23, 2015
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