Thursday the weather turned cool, with a slight nip in the air early in the morning. As it was my day off, I decided to go for a walk in the countryside. I had noticed earlier that the farmers were beginning to harvest the rice below our apartment. I had seen a path beside one of the buildings, and hoped that it would lead to the fields, which I could see but could not get to. The path led past a brick farmhouse, turned left along a pond, and finally down into the fields. There were terraced levels of vegetables growing on each side of the path. The fields are all shapes and sizes that fit together like a patchwork quilt. There are a small walls along the outside, downhill edges. The walls are about 6 inches higher than the field, and it is along them that you walk. They are only the width of a footpath, with no space being wasted. As I curved along the paths and over the two short logs wired together that cross the little irrigation ditches, I could see people harvesting the rice below me.
The fields are turned over by hand, with the farmers using stout hoes, 9 inches long and about 4 inches wide. The fields are fairly wet when they are turned over, leaving the soil in chunks. The vegetables are then transplanted in the dips between the chunks and fed with liquid fertilizer, the cleanings from the pigpens. Each farmhouse has a brick lean-to built onto the outside wall. Here the pigs are kept. The floor to the pen is paved and angled, and the waste drains into an outside holding tank. Then it is collected by the women in buckets and spread on the plants. Several times I passed women carrying two buckets full on shoulder poles, with a large ladle fastened on the side on one of the buckets. I did not envy them that job!
I reached a path above the rice fields, which generally occupy the swales in the valleys. There were many people helping with the harvest, men and women both. The women were mainly cutting the rice with small sickle-shaped knives about 6 inches long. The rice was planted in clusters of approximately 10 plants, so it was very convenient to grab a bunch and slice it off. When the women bent over to cut the rice, all you could see was the top of their backs. The men were gathered around a box-shaped machine with a small motor attached to the side. They were attempting to get the motor started. It took a considerable amount of cranking before it finally turned over with a low roar. Later in the day, Tim and I returned to the fields and saw that the motor turned a drum covered with metal loops about 2 inches long. The men gathered armfuls of cut rice and tipped it grain end in, first one side, then the other. The grain had been cut several days earlier and was laid out in long rows. After the rice had been stripped from the stalks, the stalks were piled next to the harvester and later tied up in stokes, bound with some of the rice stems themselves. Usually the older generation is responsible for stoking the left over stems. The stokes are then laid in a circle, top end in, one on top of the other until the circle is 3-4 feet high and then topped with a domed roof of stems. It looks like a miniature round, thatched house.
Several things struck me about the harvest -- that everyone was involved, helping each other; that only the minimum of machinery is used; and that the quality and quantity of production is so high. When Tim and I visited in the afternoon, a group of youth came over to say hello. An English teacher told us it was her 7th grade class. She had brought them over to help the farmers so that they could develop an appreciation for the work the farmers did and the importance of farming to society. The youth had spent the day cutting rice and feeding it into the harvester.
One young farmer was washing his plow in the pond. An old man was passing with the large hoe. He really got a kick out of Tim wanting to photograph him. In the background was the freshly plowed field. It had been a field of rice less than two weeks earlier. Now it was dug up a foot deep, using a water buffalo and the simple plow. The harvester was on skids and four men pushed it over the fields to where the grain needed to be harvested. Those were the only two pieces of machinery that we saw; yet anywhere on earth, the fields would be considered bumper-crop producers.
The rice grows waist high. After harvesting it is gathered in bags, or carried to the farmhouses in baskets on shoulder poles. There it is spread on the cement in front of the houses, and dried. For farmers that don't have space in front of their houses, the side of the road is used. All vehicles just move over and drive around the drying rice.
I am amazed and humbled by the farmers. How they keep everything growing year round, steadily producing a living income, without being overwhelmed, I do not know. The rice harvest lasts over a month, yet only a couple of fields ripen at the same time. Each field is ready to cut within a couple of days of each other, staggered over the month. The precision and timing of the planting and harvesting is incredible.
No one will ever convince me that the farmer is not very bright. Walking along the fields' edges on the narrow dikes, it reminds me of the ancient history that is China's. To think that all these walls, dikes, and drainage ditches were dug, and the whole valley terraced, by hand is mind-boggling to me. We have an incredible amount to learn from these people.
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