Norman Uphoff
Norman Uphoff, Professor Emeritus of Government and International Agriculture at Cornell University, has worked on economic, social, political, rural and agricultural development in the global South for over 50 years. During the first part of his academic career, he taught political science while engaging in interdisciplinary applied social science in Asia and Africa; the second part concentrated more on sustainable development and on agroecological innovation, particularly focusing on the System of Rice Intensification. He was chair of Cornell’s Rural Development Committee in the Center for International Studies, 1971-1990, and then served as Director of the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development, 1990-2005. After formally retiring in 2005, he served as Director of Graduate Studies for the university’s MPA program, the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, and then as its Director, 2010-2014, continuing to teach until 2020. He has continued since then as advisor for the SRI International Network and Resources Center based at Cornell.
Early life and career
Uphoff grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm and did his first degree at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1963. In 1966, he completed a master's degree at Princeton University in modernization of developing areas, and then he earned a doctorate in political science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1970, with concentrations also in public administration and development economics.After receiving his PhD degree, he joined the faculty of Cornell University, where he formed a multi-disciplinary Rural Development Committee and chaired it until 1990, working on participatory development, local organization, irrigation management, assisting small farmers in the developing world, and social capital.
In the 1980s, he served on the Research Advisory Committee of the US Agency for International Development, and on the South Asia Committee of the U.S. Social Science Research Council. He was at various times a consultant for the World Bank, USAID, the United Nations, FAO, the Ford Foundation, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, and other agencies. After being appointed as the first director of CIIFAD in 1990, his work focused more on initiatives for sustainable agriculture and broad-based rural development.
Expertise
Around 2000, Uphoff’s research interests expanded beyond the social sciences to include new knowledge and practices in the crop and soil sciences, with attention to microbiology and the soil biota. This was prompted by his becoming acquainted in Madagascar with the System of Rice Intensification through work with the NGO Association Tefy Saina. SRI enabled farmers in that country whose paddy yields with usual methods on soils evaluated by North Carolina State University as ‘very poor’ were around 2 tons/hectare to average 8 tons/hectare. This improvement was achieved without changing to new higher-yielding varieties, using less water, and not relying on chemical fertilizer, instead using compost made from any available organic material.After such results had been attained for three consecutive years around Ranomafana National Park and were being seen in other parts of Madagascar as well, Uphoff began trying to get agricultural specialists and farmers in other countries to evaluate SRI methods for themselves. Uphoff made hundreds of presentations on SRI in more than 4o countries and published dozens of articles on this innovation.
The first validation of SRI’s effectiveness outside Madagascar was by rice scientists in China and Indonesia in 1999-2000. Within two decades, the testing and dissemination of SRI spread to over 65 countries, showing that more rice could be produced by using less seed, less water, fewer purchased inputs, at lower cost, and often with less labor.
This methodology has not been without its critics and opponents However, as evidence accumulated, the controversy subsided, and increasing numbers of governments and donor agencies have begun utilizing SRI ideas and methods. His experience with SRI drew Uphoff more and more into the domains of microbiology and soil ecology.
SRI
When SRI methods are appropriately adapted to local conditions, rice harvests typically can be increased by 50% or more with reduced external inputs. Rice seedlings are transplanted singly, not in clumps, at a young age, and with wider spacing. This reduces plant population per m2 by 80-90%. Alternate wetting and drying of paddy fields, rather than continuous flooding, reduces water requirements by 25-50%. The application of compost or other organic material to the soil reduces or even replaces the use of inorganic fertilizer, improving soil structure and enhancing the life in the soil: beneficial microbes, earthworms, and other aerobic organisms. This promotes greater growth of plant roots and more tillering. The resulting plants are more resistant to climate-change effects of drought, storm damage, and extreme temperatures and emit less greenhouse gases.The System of Rice Intensification emphasizes the quality rather than quantity of individual plants, tapping their genetic potential more fully to induce more robust and productive phenotypes from a given genotype. SRI has experienced significant opposition within the rice science profession, including criticism by a few of Uphoff’s peers at Cornell University. There is, however, extensive scientific literature on SRI now, most of it elaborating on and validating the earlier reports about SRI effectiveness. Some scientists at the International Rice Research Institute have been critics, but IRRI now has an SRI page on its website. Governments in China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Philippines, countries where two-thirds of the world's rice is produced, are now promoting SRI methods to raise paddy yields, as well as the governments of Mali and Tanzania.
CIIFAD's work on SRI was made possible by support provided anonymously to Cornell in 1990 by Charles F. Feeney's Atlantic Philanthropies. Cornell was given $15 million to work toward sustainable agricultural and rural development with colleagues in developing countries. It was in connection with his duties as CIIFAD director that Dr. Uphoff learned about SRI in Madagascar in 1993 and was subsequently able to travel to many other countries to encourage others to learn about and evaluate SRI's agroecological methods. This methodology has been extrapolated to other crops: wheat, finger millet, sugarcane, teff, green, red and black grams, and various vegetables, usually by farmers themselves. In 2015, Uphoff and SRI were awarded the first Olam Prize for Innovation in Food Security.
Representative publications
"Biological Approaches to Regenerative Soil Systems," 2nd ed, editor with J.E. Thies, and contributor.“SRI 2.0 and beyond: Sequencing the protean evolution of the System of Rice Intensification," Agronomy, 13:1253. https://
www.mdpi.com/2073-4395/ 13/5/1253 Retrieved November 10, 2025.
"The System of Rice Intensification: Memoires of an Innovation", Parts I and II.
"The System of Rice Intensification: Responses to Frequently Asked Questions", CIIFAD, Ithaca, NY, with Spanish, Chinese,
Burmese, and Farsi translations.
"Biological Approaches to Sustainable Soil Systems", chief editor and contributor.
"Agroecological Innovations: Increasing Food Production with Participatory Development", editor and contributor
“Soil health: Linking research and action for more regenerative agriculture,” with S. Sherwood, Applied Soil Ecology, 15.
“Demonstrated benefits from social capital: The productivity of farmer organizations in Gal Oya, Sri Lanka,” with C.M. Wijayaratna,
World Development, 28.
“Understanding social capital: Learning from analysis and experience of participation,” in Social Capital: A Multifaceted
Perspective, P. Dasgupta and I. Serageldin, eds..
Reasons for Success: Learning from Instructive Experiences in Rural Development, with M.J. Esman and A. Krishna.
Reasons for Hope: Instructive Experiences in Rural Development, editor with A. Krishna and M.J. Esman, and contributor.
“Revisiting institution-building: How organizations become institutions,” in Puzzles of Productivity in Public Organizations, ed. N.
Uphoff.
“Grassroots organizations and NGOs in rural development: Opportunities with diminishing states and expanding markets,” World
Development, 21.
Learning from Gal Oya: Possibilities for Participatory Development and Post-Newtonian Social Science.
Managing Irrigation: Analyzing and Improving the Performance of Bureaucracies.
Local Institutional Development: An Analytical Casebook with Cases.
Improving Irrigation Management with Farmer Participation: Getting the Process Right.
Local Organizations: Intermediaries in Rural Development, with M.J. Esman.
Local Organization and Rural Development in Asia, 3 vol. on South, East and Southeast Asia, editor and contributor.
“Participation’s place in rural development: Seeking clarity through specificity,” with J.M. Cohen, World Development, 8.
The Air War in Indochina, with R. Littauer.
The Political Economy of Development: Theoretical and Empirical Contributions, with W.F. Ilchman.
The Political Economy of Change, with W.F. Ilchman.