Rice cultivation

“ The country to the north of the road between the anicut and the town of Trichinopoly was a wide expanse of bright green rice cultivation, stretching to the horizon. In Southern India there are two annual crops of rice, called the caar and the soombah or peshanum crops. The former is reaped in October and is [Pg 428] reckoned inferior, and the latter in February and March. Two crops in the year from the same land do not yield much more than a single crop, but, owing to the liability of the seasons to fail, the cultivators rear as much as possible for the first crop. ”

“ Rice cultivation.In South Camarines the sowing of the rice in beds begins in June or July, always at the commencement of the rainy season; but in fields artificially watered, earlier, because thus the fruit ripens at a time when, the store in the country being small, its price is high. Although the rice fields could very well give two crops yearly, they are tilled only once. It is planted out in August, with intervals of a hand’s-breadth between each row and each individual plant; and within four months the rice is ripe. The fields are never fertilized, and but seldom ploughed ”

“ When the seed of the rice is about to be sown in the nursery or bedding-out ground, where under the wet system of cultivation it is regularly allowed to sprout before being transplanted to the fields, the best grains are picked out to form the Rice-mother. These are then sown in the middle of the bed, and the common seed is planted round about them. The state of the Rice-mother is supposed to exert the greatest influence on the growth of the rice; if she droops or pines away, the harvest will be bad in consequence. ”

“ The upland rice requires much more care and labor in its cultivation. The land must be ploughed three or four times, and all the turf and lumps well broken up by the harrow.
During its growth it requires to be weeded two or three times, to keep the weeds from choking the crop. ”

“ Many of the high mountains showed cultivation to the very top, while the plains with their alternate groups of bamboo, cocoanut, and other palms, were green with the new rice crop, the cultivation of this commodity being different in Java from that in Burma. Great care is expended on the culture of the rice, the tiny plants first being put in small wet enclosures;168 then, when sufficiently developed, they are planted separately by the small army of workers, in receptacles made for them, and set with the greatest regularity. ”

“ As the ground cannot be worked in this fashion until the rains come on, and the young plants should be set in the ground very shortly thereafter, the period during which the soil can be prepared is brief, and the amount brought under cultivation is correspondingly small. Rice is usually planted in seed beds and transplanted by hand, the object of this procedure being to give it a start over the weeds which would otherwise swamp it. ”

“ In the north there is but one annual crop, but in the south two crops are grown. The principal cultivation being rice, he is perforce constrained to the system of co-operation, as, there being no fences, all the rice crop of a large flat area, sometimes minutely subdivided, must be reaped at the same time, so that when the crop has been removed the cattle and buffaloes may roam over the flat for what pasturage they can pick up before the flooding of the land and preparation for the next crop. ”

“ The natives in the same lofty localities find no deficient returns in the crops of rice, which they raise in the ravines and hollows, into which the earth from above has been washed by the periodical rains; but the cultivation of rice is so entirely dependent on the presence of water, that no inference can be fairly drawn as to the quality of the soil from the abundance of its harvest. ”

“ The Agricultural Department conducted several comparative trials with Indian and local varieties of rice. The Indian rices were much smaller in size of grain and were generally not considered so suitable as the local kinds, with respect to which it was found that, with a sufficiency of seed used in sowing and deep cultivation, excellent crops could be secured. The native method of using less than half a bushel of seed to sow an acre is accountable for much of the resultant crop becoming full of weeds. ”

“ The new cultures have not dispossessed the old, however, and the sawas, or flooded rice-fields, break the level of plain and valley floor with their myriad waving lines of division, and climb by terraces to the very hilltops—a system of cultivation and irrigation as old as the human race, and followed in these same valleys by these same Sundanese since the beginning of their recorded time. To them rice is a holy grain, the offspring of a god, and the gods’ best gift to man ”

“ The plains around the lake formed by the intermingling and decomposition of volcanic products are of amazing fertility, and with a little management in the rotation of crops might be kept in continual cultivation. Rice is now grown on them for three or four years in succession, when they are left fallow for the same period, after which rice or maize can be again grown. Good rice produces thirty-fold, and coffee trees continue bearing abundantly for ten or fifteen years, without any manure and with scarcely any cultivation. ”

“ In the cultivation of rice they show very great ingenuity, the kètsa grounds, where the rice is sown before transplanting, being formed either on the margins of the streams or in the hollows of the hills in a series of terraces, to which water is often conducted from a considerable distance. ”

“ The mud is made very fine, and as deep as this mode of cultivation, will stir it. The rice has been sown in nurseries, and when from a foot to fifteen inches high it is pulled up, bound into bundles of approximately one hundred plants each, and taken, usually in boats, to the prepared field, where it is all transplanted by hand. Often81 the root is divided, so that from one grain there come to be grown several bunches of rice. In appearance a rice field looks very much like a field of oats. ”

“ I believe these lands would make a great deal if we understood the cutting and curing of hay, for the grass grows most luxuriantly if the land is ploughed and left, but the curing of hay is unknown to the rice-field darky. 68
Our uplands are very fertile and adapted to any crop, it seems. Last year a few tried cotton and did very well without any commercial fertilizer. The only trouble is the nice cultivation cotton requires. ”

“ Botanists have not sufficiently studied Chinese plants for us to know whether rice is often found outside cultivated ground; but Loureiro1957 had seen it in marshes in Cochin-China.
Rumphius and modern writers upon the Malay Archipelago give it only as a cultivated plant. The multitude of names and varieties points to a very ancient cultivation. In British India it dates at least from the Aryan invasion, for rice has Sanskrit names, vrihi, [Pg 386] arunya1958 whence come, probably, several names in modern Indian languages, and oruza or oruzon of the ancient Greeks, rouz or arous of the Arabs. ”

“ Cultivation of the soil there is none. Fire clears the jungle, and the ashes manure the soil; the ground is then superficially scratched, and rice is sown. Nothing more is done. Every seed germinates; the paddy ripens, and, where one basketful is sown, five hundred basketfuls are gathered. And the field lies untouched till again covered with jungle. Thus is the heathen rewarded five-hundred-fold in accordance with the law of Nature which gives blessing to the labour of the husbandman inversely as he deserves it. ”

“ Our 142 labor understands no other cultivation; the whole population lives on rice, white and black, especially black. It is a wonderfully nutritious and sustaining food, and if suddenly its cultivation ceases there will be much suffering. ”

“ The seed is sown in beds, usually by strewing very thickly the corn in the ear. From these beds the plants, when 12 or 14 days old, are removed into the fields and thinly set by the hand. They are then kept constantly immersed in water until within a fortnight of the harvest, when it is drawn off to facilitate the ripening of the grain.
The fourth mode of cultivating rice is by forcing a crop by artificial irrigation, at any time of the year; thus, in one field, in various plots, the operations of sowing, ploughing, transplanting, and reaping may be seen at the same period. ”

“ The first working of the rice fields after the transplanting, as we saw it in Japan, consisted in spading between the hills with a four-tined hoe, apparently more for loosening the soil and aeration than for killing weeds. After this treatment the field was gone over again in the manner seen in Fig. 166, where the man is using his bare hands to smooth and level the stirred soil, taking care to eradicate every weed, burying them beneath the mud, and to straighten each hill of rice as it is passed. Sometimes the fingers are armed with bamboo claws to facilitate the weeding. ”

“ It is usually grown in swampy land or else on irrigated fields. In most countries rice is grown in the most primitive fashion. Immense irrigating plants and modern agricultural machinery make possible the large production in parts of the United States.
It is the chief crop in southeastern Asia, from India through Indo-China, a great part of China, southern Japan and many islands of the Pacific. Rice of excellent quality is raised in Texas, Louisiana and South Carolina, and an amount about equal to the production of this country is imported from eastern Asia. ”

“ The rice plant requires an abundance of water in the soil, and thrives best on land subject to overflow for a portion of the year, or which is artificially flooded. Rice is most largely grown in India, China, Japan and Egypt—India alone producing nearly thirty million bushels per year. The rice grown in this country is confined to eight states, with an area of 174,173 acres in 1879, and a yield of 110,131,373 pounds, averaging 632 pounds per acre. ”

“ Four months more are needed for the ripening of the grain, during which the fields are kept clear of weeds, the natives wading back and forth through the mud in their task. After cutting and heaping, the paddy is made into stacks. In six weeks more the grain is separated from the straw by treading or by the use of the flail, or by causing ponies to trot over it. It may be said that there is nothing in nature more beautiful than a valley of green ripening rice in the midst of verdant hills. In the flood of rich color beneath my eyes, I have gazed upon such a scene with inexpressible delight. ”

“ Before many days, the young plants are growing, tall and green, and the field makes a beautiful appearance as the wind sweeps across it. In about five or six months the green has turned to a rich yellow; the rice is then ripe and ready for the harvest. Again the men, women, and children go out to the fields armed with sickles to gather in the precious crop. ”

“ In June the peasants were still spreading over the fields the decomposed oak-leaves used as fertilizer, but by early July the transplanting of rice began, soon to be followed by the weeding. Gangs pull up the closely grown seedlings and tie them in bundles, which they throw out across the fields to be planted with an expertness which reminds one that their national pastime, at least in pre-Japanese days, was stone-throwing. The earth-laden roots being much the heavier end, the bundles unfailingly land upright just where the thrower chooses to place them. ”

“ The rice-fields are usually very small and of all shapes. A quarter of an acre is a good-sized field. The rice crop planted in June is not reaped till November, but in the meantime it needs to be “puddled” three times, i.e. for all the people to turn into the slush, and grub out all the weeds and tangled aquatic plants, which weave themselves from tuft to p. 37tuft, and puddle up the mud afresh round the roots. It grows in water till it is ripe, when the fields are dried off. An acre of the best land produces annually about fifty-four bushels of rice, and of the worst about thirty. ”

“ In the three main islands of Japan more than fifty per cent of the cultivated land produces a crop of water rice each year and 7.96 per cent of the entire land area of the Empire, omitting far-north Karafuto. In Formosa and in southern China large areas produce two crops each year. At the large mean yield used in the computation the estimated acreage of rice in China proper amounts to 5.93 per cent of her total area and this is 7433 square miles greater than the acreage of wheat in the United States in 1907. ”

“ I never have had a field hand-whipped turn out over twenty bushels to the acre, and I have seldom had one threshed in the mill until these last very bad years turn out under thirty.
All of this made me determine to try planting mill-threshed rice this year. I planted a small portion in a bowl of water on cotton, which is the approved way of trying seed, and nearly every single seed germinated and shot up a fine healthy leaf. So I felt no hesitation about it; and I began with my wages field, putting half a bushel more to the acre in case there should be some grains cracked in the mill. ”

“ Men generally pull up the plants, and convey them to the fields, where women up to their knees in mire separate the plants, and place them in holes at a regular distance of about five inches from one another. They are left for some days to take root, when the grounds are again irrigated. The rice grows to the height of somewhat more than a yard, and after four months is ready for harvest. ”

“ Since that time select Japanese species, chosen for superior milling qualities, have been widely introduced, as the market prejudice in favour of head rice made the large percentage of broken rice a heavy handicap to the farmers. Hundreds of varieties have been tested by the state and federal agricultural experiment stations. A strong tendency to run to red rice (hardier, but not so marketable) has been a second great difficulty to overcome.
Irrigation is almost entirely confined to rice farms. In the prairie region there is abundant water at depths of 100 to 400 ft. ”