Imagine this: 2,000 poor rice farmers, whose average farm income is around US$100 per year, suddenly take on the role of agricultural scientist. Over the course of 2 years — 4 seasons — they prove that insecticides are a complete waste of time and money, and that they can significantly reduce the amount of nitrogen fertilizer they use. They save, on average, $17 per year. It might not sound like much to some, but it’s a 17% pay rise for people who struggle to provide sufficient food for themselves and their families, and enough to help put children through school or buy grain to tide rice-deficit farm families over to the next harvest.  Sound unlikely? Well, it’s just happened in Bangladesh. In the last 2 years, the Livelihood Improvement Through Ecology (LITE) project, led by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), has trained 2,000 farmers to perform experiments in their own fields which demonstrate that insecticide can be eliminated and nitrogen fertilizer (urea) applications reduced without lowering yields. Four thousand more farmers are currently in training.   What’s more, if LITE continues as it has started, in less than a decade, most of Bangladesh’s 11.8 million rice farmers — almost a 12th of the country’s population of 141 million, according to the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute, a key project partner — will have eliminated insecticides and optimized their fertilizer use.  LITE — part of the IRRI-led project Poverty Elimination Through Rice Research Assistance, funded for Bangladesh by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development — set out to discover the exact cause of an assumed drop in rice yield when farmers stop spraying insecticide. The ultimate aim,