Rice mill

“ In the hollow a quantity of rice is held. A piece of timber, fastened to a pivot, extends in a horizontal position with one end over the mill. To this end another timber is fastened in an upright position. A Chinaman gets on to the end of the long timber which is farthest from the mill. This raises the end with the upright. He then jumps off and the upright falls, striking upon the rice. In this way the hulls are worn off.
After hulling, the grain is carefully screened, in order to remove the hulls, the broken and very small kernels, and the rice flour. This latter makes good cattle food. ”

“ The crop is cut with a sickle, threshed with a flail, or by the treading of cattle; and the husks, which adhere closely to the kernel, are beaten off in a stone mortar, or by passing the grain through a mill, similar to our corn-mills. The mode of cultivating rice in any part of the world, varies but little from the foregoing process. The point which requires the greatest attention, is keeping the ground properly covered with water. ”

“ No rice-husking, winnowing or pearling-machines are in use in the Philippines other than some small ones for domestic use. The great number of kinds of rice-paddy hinders their use on a large scale, since the mill adapted to one field would not clean the crop of another. The grain is generally husked in a large hard-wood mortar, where it is beaten with a pestle, several men and women at times working over one mortar. There is also in use a primitive wooden mill worked by buffaloes. ”

“ The same seed is planted in the same soil from year to year, a system which, it is generally conceded, will deteriorate the quality and production of any grain crop. A very large proportion of the rice grown in Carolina is prepared for market at the steam toll-mills, in the vicinity of Charleston; and a mill of this description near New Orleans, would remedy the greatest defect in the rice of the country, greatly increase the demand for the article, and undoubtedly yield a large return for the investment. The toll mills at and around Charleston are, and always have been, prosperous. ”

“ The tug brought the three flats at daylight this morning. I could not get all three unloaded, but the rice from two is safely stowed in the mill and the other will have to take its chances in the flat till Monday. The hands worked well to-day, and were very merry and danced for my artist friend. A man came bringing $2 to buy two wagon loads of rice straw. It is in great demand and it is hard to refuse to sell it when people want it so much. ”

“ I have offered hand-whipped rice for sale at $1.30 a bushel, 75 and mill-threshed at $1 per bushel, and have sold 159 bushels of the former and 225 bushels of the latter, which has been a great help. We have made a fine start on the upland crop, and the corn looks very well. The small acreage planted in cotton also looks well, and I hope it will be worked properly while I am gone. ”

“ Before sunrise, as the sonorous chant rises from the wat, these mills are at work too, and often the last thing at night one hears them still. Mr. McCarthy has described them, but I may just mention that they consist of a piece of tree-trunk hollowed into a funnel-shape, into which the rice is put, and a long lever worked at the outer end by the foot, the woman stepping on and off, fitted with a hammer-head of wood, of which several of different sizes are used. And while the mother works her loom close by, the two daughters will work the mill and chat and chaff the passers-by. ”

“ Before husking the rice grain is in appearance not unlike barley and it is no easy matter to get its husk off. The husking mill is often made of hardened clay with many wooden teeth on the rubbing surface. ”

“ Our cattle live on the straw, it being the strongest and most palatable of the straws. My horses will not touch fresh oat straw while there is a wisp of old rice straw to be had; the cows and pigs are fed on the flour, a gray substance that comes from the grain as the chaff is removed in the pounding mill. Mr. Studebake, a great Hereford cattle man, told me that rice flour and pea-vine hay make a perfect ration for cows, one supplying exactly what the other lacks. If rice is given up the cattle and pigs will have to go too. ”

“ The Minangkabauers definitely attribute a soul to rice, and will sometimes assert that rice pounded in the usual way tastes better than rice ground in a mill, because in the mill the body of the rice was so bruised and battered that the soul has fled from it. Like the Javanese they think that the rice is under the special guardianship of a female spirit called Saning Sari, who is conceived as so closely knit up with the plant that the rice often goes by her name, as with the Romans the corn might be called Ceres. ”

“ The first day of threshing is always trying. The feed house is packed up to the very roof with the rice from P. D. Wragg, and I want to get it threshed out to allow Vareen to be brought out of the flat and stowed in the feed room. Of course the belts, etc., all have to be adjusted, and it took so long to get in good running order that when they got through threshing the rice in the mill they all declared it was too late to unload the flat. I insisted, however, on their working until sunset, as they had spent many hours idle while the bands were being adjusted. ”

“ Some people, not having dank or moist spots suitable for rice on their farms, planted rice on the uplands, and were surprised to find they had an average yield with those who had planted the moist spots; and thus it has come about that even now in the South rice is planted on the uplands. Some few rude rice mills were hastily put up for stripping the coarse brown husks from the rice, but as they were distant from most of the planters in our settlement, wooden mortars had to be temporarily improvised. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Recently, however, mills worked by gasoline engines are in operation for both hulling and polishing, in Japan.
The many uses to which rice straw is put in the economies of these people make it almost as important as the rice itself. As food and bedding for cattle and horses; as thatching material for dwellings and other shelters; as fuel; as a mulch; as a source of organic matter in the soil, and as a fertilizer, it represents a money value which is very large. Besides these ultimate uses the rice straw is extensively employed in the manufacture of articles used in enormous quantities. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While the place was being slowly reset in cane, it would doubtless be profitable to grow rice; but the negroes were unwilling to undertake it. Here, as in the rice lands of South Carolina and Georgia, there was every prospect that free labor would prove absolutely fatal to the culture. Men would not work in rice swamps except under compulsion. There is a species of rice, which grows like wheat, on uplands; but it only yields about one-fourth of a crop. On good rice lands the yield per acre varies from thirty-five to fifty bushels. Exceptional crops have run up as high as ninety bushels. ”

“ Two crops of rice are commonly grown each year in southern China and during the winter and early spring, grain, cabbage, rape, peas, beans, leeks and ginger may occupy the fields as a third or even fourth crop, making the total year's product from the land very large; but the amount of thought, labor and fertilizers given to securing these is even greater and beyond anything Americans will endure. How great these efforts are will be appreciated from what is seen in Fig. 50, representing two fields thrown into high ridges, planted to ginger and covered with straw. ”

“ The rice which they cultivate is to them an almost unknown luxury: millet is their staple food, and on high days and holidays they receive messes of barley or buckwheat. Where the mulberry-tree is grown, and the silkworm is "educated," there the labourer receives the highest wage.
The rice crop on good land should yield twelve and a half fold, and on ordinary land from six to seven fold only. Ordinary arable land is only half as valuable as rice land, which cannot be purchased for less than forty riyos per tan of 1,800 square feet. Common hill or wood land is cheaper, again, than arable land ”

“ It was a rainy morning, and the green rice plain looked greener under the gray sky as we rode away from Nara. Men and women were working in the fields, wading knee-deep in the mud and water, stirring the muck around the young shoots, and tearing up the water-weeds with iron hooks. No other grain requires as much care as rice, and from the first transplanting from the seed-bed until the ears of grain are formed, there is continuous grubbing in the mire of the paddy fields. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By skilful use of fertilisers he has been able to raise good crops of rice on the same land during fifteen or twenty centuries. On the other hand, not only is the population increasing at the rate of half a million annually, but in proportion to the growth of general prosperity and the distribution of wealth, the lower classes of the people, who used formerly to be content with barley and millet, now regard rice as an essential article of food. ”

“ So far I have only forty acres of rice land rented, and I feel very blue about the future. Then, again, my sheep and cattle at Casa Bianca, which have been so remunerative to me all these years, are giving me trouble now.
A friend and neighbor, who has been heretofore a confirmed rice planter, and never planted an acre of corn, has become disgusted with rice and enclosed a large body of land which has been thrown out for years, and is going to plant corn and cotton. This land touches mine, and my animals have had the run of it. ”

“ Rice appears to have been grown from time immemorial, and certainly at the present day the inhabitants would as soon think of giving up their date-trees as of replacing it by any other crop. Now, however, that facilities exist for the export of farm-produce to the Nile Valley markets, it will be interesting to observe whether rice will to any extent be replaced by more valuable crops. ”

“ But where it is grown it is grown to the exclusion of all other crops. The rice crop is most important in Burma, Bengal and Madras, and there is an average of 20 million acres under rice in the other provinces of British India. In Bengal the area varies from 36 to 40 million acres according to the season. In Burma, where the large waste area is being gradually brought under cultivation, there has been an almost uninterrupted increase in the area of the rice crop, and the rice export is one of the main industries of the province. ”

“ Summarising a report of the Department of Agriculture and Commerce, he says of the factory workers: "The bulk of workers are female and are chiefly fed with boiled rice in 43 per cent. of the factories. In other factories the staple food is poor, the rice being mixed with cheaper barley, millet or sweet potato in the proportion of from 20 to 50 per cent. ”

“ Special effort is being made to promote the rice industry, for although rice is the staple article of food for the Filipinos, not enough is produced for home consumption. The most approved American methods are being followed on the rice farm, and the crop of last year, which occupied about 1,000 acres, was seeded, cut and thrashed out with the latest machinery. ”

“ Our yield of wheat, however, was but 19,000,000 tons, while China's output of rice was certainly double and probably three times this amount from nearly the same acreage of land; and notwithstanding this large production per acre, more than fifty per cent, possibly as high as seventy-five per cent, of the same land matures at least one other crop the same year, and much of this may be wheat or barley, both chiefly consumed as human food. ”

“ 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. ”