The Old Ways

 

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As I drive down farm roads this spring, I notice acres and acres of recently planted rice fields.  The rice is sprouted and is coming up in perfect, symmetrical rows, shimmering kelly green in the moist soil as the sun rises in the east.  Most of the fields are drill planted these days.  What a difference!  This time of year in the past, you would be awakened by crop dusters (arial applicators) flying over your house en route to plant this year's crop of rice.  I scarcely heard a single one this year.

Growing up on a rice farm as a kid, I remembered the old process well.  All rice was planted in the water.  Levees were pulled and fields were worked to loosen the soil and then flooded.  Then the fields were water leveled.  Tractors would drag water levels across the field.  The soil would become a muddy slurry, and you would pull the high places down to the low.  Gravity would level the area to somewhat allow for a pinpoint flood.  Laser leveling has GREATLY increased the accuracy of this process these days.

Planting in the water and water-leveling served another purpose - to try to keep red rice in check.  Red rice is an insidious thing.  It grows taller than the other rice, with a red or black seed that makes your sample of rice ugly and you would be docked in price for having rice with red rice in it.  Since it is taller, as the rice ripens and winds blow, the red rice would fall down (lodging), and it would knock down all the good rice with it, making harvest a slow, arduous task.  Planting in the water in a water leveled field attempted to bury the red rice seed so that it wouldn't germinate.  Red rice reminds me a lot of the wheat and the tares parable in the Bible.

We would purchase seed rice that would come in 100 pound burlap sacks to plant in the fields.  We would flood an irrigation canal and unload each sack into the flooded canal to soak.  After a few days, the rice would 'pip out,' meaning a small sprout would emerge.  Once this occurred, we would use a conveyor belt tilted into the flooded canal.  We would lift each sack onto the conveyor belt and others would remove the water-soaked sack of rice and stack it on the back of the truck.  It was so cold to be in the canal lifting those HEAVY sacks of rice.

The truck would be driven to the landing strip where a crop duster pilot would meet us in his plane.  He'd go over the maps to ensure the correct field would be planted.  The burlap sacks were cut open and all of the rice would be dumped into a loader on a truck that would be lifted up and loaded onto the crop duster.  The pilot would fly over the field, releasing the rice that would scatter into the water-leveled field.  

After a few days, the water would be drained from the field and the newly planted rice would grow.  Today, the land isn't worked as intentionally because weeds are "burned down" by using Round Up and seed rice is directly drilled into the unworked soil.  Red rice is controlled by chemicals and the  The 'old way' was a lot more labor intensive and manual in nature.  

As we try to examine the cost-benefit analysis of then versus now, it's a complicated calculation.  Yes, the old ways involved many people doing hard work.  Compared to today, the process wasn't as accurate nor efficient as it is done today.  On the other hand, we've largely replaced people with machines.  Expensive machines.  Expensive machines that you can't work on anymore.  Expensive machines that only a few can afford.  Farming increasingly implements the use an array of chemicals and the small family farm has largely been replaced by corporate farms.

The amount of capital outlay, amount of risk, and number of mostly foreign workers that must be employed in order to farm today makes farming look nothing like it did in the past.  I guess I'm nostalgic for the old ways.  I wish I'd hear more crop dusters flying overhead and see a farmer walking his levees with a shovel slung over his shoulder.