Finding A Better Way

This morning while commuting to work I looked out over rice fields on either side of the road being readied for planting. I began to think back to memories of planting rice.  One of the things I hadn't thought of in a while was the practice of soaking rice prior to planting it.  The rice came in burlap bags and was pretty heavily, especially for a kid.  We had several areas in drainage canals that we'd flood with water and then throw all of the burlap bags full of rice into the water so that they would begin to sprout.

Once sprouted, we'd remove the bags of sprouted rice from the water and bring to the air strip to be loaded into Ag Cat crop dusters to be planted.  If the bags of rice were heavy when they were dry, you can about imagine how heavy they were when wet and the rice was swollen and sprouted.  It was so cold at this time to get into the water!  We would get into the frigid water and feel around for the sacks of rice.  We used a conveyor that we would borrow to get the rice out of the canal.  One end would be lowered into the water and the other end at the edge of a big truck that the rice would be loaded on.  The conveyor seemed mighty high tech at the time.  Our job would have been so much harder without it.  It looked kind of like this, except it had regular truck tires on it:
 

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The bags of sprouted rice would be driven to the air strip and we would use pocket knives to open each sack and dump into a big bag that would be lifted by a truck with a boom and would be loaded into the crop duster for planting.  Today rice farming has changed to make things more efficient and less labor-intensive.  Rice is no longer man-handled in burlap bags.  It is lifted by tractor in super bags.  As you can see in the photo below, the very heavy bag of rice is lifted and there is a chute at the bottom that is untied, allowing the rice to flow directly into the plane.

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That gets rid of the overwhelming majority of all the hard work.  It also gets rid of the nostalgia of remembering "how hard it was back in the old days."  Things have been made easier, faster, better by working with our minds instead of man and beast laboring with our backs.  There is a good side to that and a bad side as well, as I think about it.  Farming has gotten easier from the time that "Ike" made this memorable quote:

“You know, farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower