Outcome. (rice water)

My topic of my research project is RICE WATER.

The title is Can Rice Water Replace fertilizer in plant growth?

Firstly, when I first told that we need a topic for this research project, the first thing I can think of is do something related to the topic: body fitness. After hand in that topic to my lecturer, I found out that the topic is time-consuming and I face few difficulties such as unable to get someone to interview and so on. After a week, I decided to change my topic. It took me about another week to get a topic which I interested with and is achievable. The reason why I chose this current topic is because I had been wondering how rice water benefit for human skin / hair since my mother uses it almost every day to wash her face / hair. To explore more about rice water, I decided to do a research about this topic which is can rice water benefit for human skin? I showed this to my lecturer and she said it is might be better if I modify my title. This is because we shouldn’t take human as a sample for this research for some safety reason. Therefore, I modified my topic from human to plant. This is somehow a great topic because I heard from someone about rice water can promote plant growth. So I want to prove this statement and share this benefit to the community.

Let’s talk about the process I collect my sources in a short and quick way; I got many information about plant and rice via book, internet, article, journal and etc. With these sources, I can now use it as a backbone for my experiment. From the sources, I knew that rice water contain many kinds of minerals and it can dissolve into water during the process of *washing rice*. This solution is named (RICE WATER) as it contains most the important minerals of that in rice. I also got information from the sources about what kind of minerals that is vital for their live and how it affects their growth rate.

The main reason I chose to use rice water to replace fertilizer is because rice water does give more benefits compare to the use of fertilizer. Rice water is a kind of naturally occurred fertilizer and it doesn’t undergo chemical process. This can help to reduce the use of electric current and material of industry. Next, it is easily obtain since most of the Asian have rice as the main component of meal. This can also be said as convenient cause we need not to buy the fertilizer from anywhere but we only need to wash the rice and collect it. Besides that, some of the fertilizer such as cow dung, cat poop is giving out bad odour, but this will not happen to rice water as it is odourless. Lastly and most importantly, rice water can act as natural fertilizer to promote plant growth and replace chemically made fertilizer to save the environment.

To prove this hypothesis, I had done a simple yet achievable experiment which uses green beans as my fixed variable. A seed is the result of reproductive processes in sexually reproducing plants and represents a rich store of starches, oils and proteins that will provide the energy reserves for the first growth of a new plant. Germination usually begins with a swelling of the seed with water, which activates a burst of metabolic activity and cell division. The swelling leads to a splitting open of the seed case and the appearance of the new shoots and root. Its early progress can be measured by observing the growth of the new differentiating cells, the young shoot or plumule, and the young root and radicle. The materials needed were green beans, rice water, pipe water, distilled water, cotton and plastic container.

Photo 1: The bottle contains distilled water where I got it from my college’s lab. The solution in the cup is pipe water.

Photo 2: Rice water. It is collected from the process of *washing white rice*.

The procedures of this experiment start off with placing layers of cotton about 1.5cm thick into 3 different plastic containers. This is then followed by placing 5 green beans into each container. 

Subsequently, container is labeled with rice water, pipe water and distilled water. 

Figure 1: Plastic measuring cup. This is used for my experiment to measure an accurate volume for each      container.

For the container that labeled rice water is then added with 20mL of rice water. 20mL of pipe water is then added into that container labeled pipe water and for distilled water, same volume is added into the distilled water container. I water them with the same volume for a week. The results showed that for the beans that watered with rice water grow slightly taller than that of pipe water. Beans that were watered with distilled water died off just after 7 days. This is because distilled water contain zero minerals that can act as nutrient for the germinating of beans.

Photo 5: Beans that watered with distilled water for a week. It lacks of nutrients and died off after it finish uses the starches, oils and proteins that were originally in the beans.

Photo 6: Beans that were watered with rice water. It was taller and have bigger leaves size compare to the plant that was watered with pipe water.

Height- 13.4cm (approximately)

Width of largest leaves- 2.3cm (approximately)

  

Photo 7: Beans that were watered with pipe water.

Height- 12.0cm (approximately)

Width of largest leaves- 1.8cm (approximately)

With this observations. This can be a prove that rice water did promote plant growth like fertilizer. It provided nutrients that is required by the beans for their growth.

I continue this experiment for another 2 weeks. I transferred both plants into new bigger plastic container that have the same amount/ weight of soil. It seems to be that the plant that was watered with rice water is shorter than that of pipe water. This can be explain because as rice water provide nutrients (minerals) that will accumulate in soils if it is watered with rice water everyday. This causes the soil to be concentrated with minerals and make it hypertonic to the plant. Since the soil is hypertonic to plant roots. It is difficult for the plant to take in water for their respiration process. It seems to had stunted growth. This whole concept is just exactly the same with that of FERTILIZER. We do not put fertilizer everday but maybe once in a week/ month. 

Photo 8: (left- rice water, right- pipe water)

Height- obviously that the plant watered with pipe water is taller.

Widths of largest leaf- Pipe water’s plant have bigger leaves size.

For the best result of using rice water on plant as natural fertilizer to replace chemically made fertilizer, we should use it 2-3 times per week.

Since rice water can promote plant growth, will you use rice water in the future?
Will you tell anyone (friends, parents, family, relatives) about this?
Please kindly do your part to save this earth by reducing use of chemically-made fertilizer.