Indonesia was called as a food self-sufficiency country, but it faded away due to public interest in the sector. It displays that the government imports rice from Vietnam and Thailand. In fact, Indonesia is potential to manage food resources if it is noticed that there are a lot of wide agricultural areas in Indonesia.
Overcoming the issue, two students of Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta (UMY), namely Cahya Adijana Nugraha from Electro Engineering Department of batch 2012 and Mukhlis Kurnia Aji from Electro Engineering of batch 2013, created a program of Mila System, a terracing system of plated rice planting, in enclosed spaces as a solution for the decreasing of the number of farmers and areas in Java.
Cahya and Mukhlis won National Essay Competition (NEC) 2015 by proposing the Mila system program. The competition was organized by Agronomy Department Student Association of Hassanudin University of Makassar (UNHAS) on 26-28 May 2015. The event raised a theme of Farmer Regeneration for Food Resources in 2017.
Cahya, the chief, was interview on Saturday (6/6). He elucidated that the Mila System was based on terracing system which is commonly implemented for reducing erosion because of irrigation. In Mila system, the terracing is to optimize the use of spaces and to foster aesthetics. “The system is combining rice and fish planting in the same area. In the system, goldfish is mostly used. The fish is put in the planting area after 4 days of rice planting. For the good care, the fish should have similar size,” he stated.
The program was expected to cope with the issues of narrow areas and decreasing of the number of farmers. “Mila system attempt to resolve the issues so that Indonesian agricultural industries could elevate since Indonesia has capable human resources for actualizing the system, indeed,” he inserted.
Furthermore, in the competition, they won over 3 other state universities. “Alhamdulillah, we won over other three state universities. The runner up was University of Airlangga, the second runner up was ITB, and the third runner up was UNHAS. The award was immediately handed over Minister of Agriculture Dr. Ir. Amran Sulaiman, M.P. who attended the closing of the competition,” told Mukhlis.
Mukhlis inserted that the competition rounds consisted of submitting proposal firstly. There were 40 submitted proposals from universities in Indonesia. Second, 15 best proposals and should be presented. “We could not believe that we passes to presentation round and even we were the winner. It might be due to our endeavor and our supervisor,” he asserted.
