His 10th death anniversary fell on December 10:

Dr. Ernest Abeyaratne - from the ashes of the chenas, a new scientific discovery

A scientific discovery depends on three things: the man, the method and the moment.

The scientific discovery in this instance was the agro-ecological concept in rural farming.

The man who discovered it was Ernest Abeyaratne. He was the gifted individual whose shrewd insight was able to spot what others had missed.

The success of a discovery depends on the moment or time of its appearance. That moment was the dawn of independence, when there was a demanding need to upgrade rural agriculture. Especially in the unirrigable uplands of the dry zone (chenas), where most food crops other than rice were grown.

Ernest was the Research Officer at the Maha Illuppallama Agriculture Station in the Anuradhapura District when we received independence in 1948.

He was given the task of improving the prevalent chena system of cropping (shifting agriculture) which had fallen on bad times.

The chenas had become less and less productive and income-generating as a result of being cultivated too often, owing to an ever increasing pressure on arable land. Previous attempts by the Department of Agriculture to salvage the situation had been unsuccessful.

Ernest discovered why: the failed departmental projects had made the mistake of treating the whole upland area uniformly, when there appeared to be two distinct land classes, which needed to be treated differently if crop yields and farmer incomes were to be improved.

There were the well-drained upper slopes where most arable crops could be cultivated successfully during the rainy Maha season. And there were the imperfectly drained lower slopes where these crops failed or performed poorly owing to water logging conditions.

Ernest consequently opened up a whole new phase of research in the 1950s to test the validity of this hypothesis, and out of the ashes of the chenas the new science of agro-ecology emerged.

In 1956 Ernest presented his findings in what amounted to be a seminal paper. He followed this with an address to the "Ceylon Association for the Advancement of Science" in 1962.

In that address he placed the cropping possibilities in the unirrigable uplands of the dry zone at the environment base level (nature of the landscape and its catenary sequences with specific soil moisture regimes) and not at the economic crop base level which had been a permanent bias in the Department of Agriculture prior to independence.

This emphasis on agro-ecology did not mean that little or no regard was given to individual crops. Notable successes were achieved by Ernest in improving degenerated chena crops like dry chilli, cowpeas, grams, ground nut and sesame. And later soya was introduced by G.W.E Fernando.

Independent Lanka had experienced changes in cultural matters, language and welfare schemes. The time was now ripe to move away from a stagnant rural agricultural economy.

The new concept of agro-ecology provided the momentum to do this. It became the conceptual framework within which the Department of Agriculture's future research programmes were formulated.

Later studies in the 1960s and 1970s on soils, rainfall probability and confidence levels (Panabokke and Walgama), made it possible to identify 24 agro-ecological regions.

For practical purposes eight major agro-ecological regions were selected to conduct future research. They replaced the existing centralised structure of research, creating a wider-based an more meaningful system that catered more efficiently and effectively to the physical differences that impact on agriculture.

- Derrick Schokman