For many decades, dry seeding was the dominant farmers' practice for establishing rainfed lowland rice (RLR) in the drought- and submergence-prone areas bordering the Songkhla lagoon along the eastern coast of southern Thailand. Because of the highly constraining soil-water complex, RLR growers have been combining an array of dry-seeding and transplanting practices adapted to varying soil and climatic conditions to be able to grow rice in their fields every year, although with a relatively low but rather stable crop productivity. During the past decades, RLR dry-seeding techniques dominated the three main types of household-based farming systems, while paddy fields most infested by weeds, particularly wild rice, were transplanted. Land preparation and crop establishment on heavytextured soils, water depth control, and weed infestation, especially by wild rice, were found to be major interrelated problems that can be addressed by strategic and applied research to stabilize yields and increase labor productivity of local dry-seeded rice systems. Labor productivity in dry-seeded paddies is often very low because of the tedious and highly time-consuming hand-weeding and thinning-transplanting practice. At least 50 d ha-1 are needed to achieve an RLR yield of more than 2.2 t ha-1 and 150 d ha-1 in wild rice-infested fields for effective control by using the integrated approach designed over time by farmers. Agronomic and economic results of on-farm experiments on land preparation and row seeding demonstrate the potential of this technique in high weed-infestation situations. Recently, a limited crop diversification scheme based on integrated systems of small-scale crop-fish rearing led to an improvement in the capture of water and supplementary irrigation. During the 1987-96 decade of high economic growth, the scarcity of farm labor increased because off-farm employment opportunities were more attractive and readily available. As a consequence, in association with adopti