Barry Mudge works part-time with Rural Solutions SA, a firm linked with the State’s Agriculture Department.

Representing the Austral-ian Centre for International Agricultural Research, he visited the Punjab “bread b asket of India” in the vast country to revolutionise the crop practices of the farmers there.

Mr Mudge told the latest Rotary Club of Port Pirie meeting that the farmers rotated rice, wheat and beans during the course of a year.

But there are problems when the rice stubble is burnt to make way for the wheat.

The smoke from the fires upsets residents’ and animals’ health and there are road smashes as a result of the haze.

The government banned the burn-offs, but was unable to enforce this without a substitute for the practice of sowing the wheat into the rice. Mr Mudge said our taxpayers had funded his trip to promote the use of the Happy Seeder, an Australian-designed straw management rotor sitting on the front of tynes.

This enables the rice to be cut back for the seeding of wheat.

He conceded that the project still had a long way to go because, of 2.5 million hectares planted to rice and wheat, only 2000 hectares so far had benefited from the machine.

Mr Mudge gave some fascinating insights into the lifestyle of farmers in the country.

The producers were not wealthy in cash terms and 65 percent of them owned less than 10 acres.

Incredibly, the land is worth about $100,000 an acre.

In a country of a billion people, he saw a youth herding cattle on the busy main road to the airport before he flew out.