Rice Harvest

Last week was rice harvest time in Isahaya. There are many, many tiny family run rice fields around town -some are elevated, cut into hill sides, some are flat and run along the main roads. The entire extended family shows up for the harvest, otherwise, I usually just see the grandparents working in the fields. The rice is grown in flooded paddies, which are drained before the cutting starts. Most of the fields are cut with a small machine the farmer can push, but some fields (at least this year) needed to be cut by hand because the typhoons blew down the rice stalks. Once cut, the stalks are tied into a shock, which are then hung upside down on racks to dry for a week or so.

Another small machine is used to feed the dried stalks into, so it can take off the seed tops (rice) and spit out the stalks. The rice is fed into big sacks and the stalks are stacked and burned. These fires are smoky and smelly... they just don't seem to have the space to compost or figure out how to get rid of the stuff they don't want. The farmers are always burning something.

Dave came across a roadside kiosk that farmers bring their rice to for hulling. Now that we know what they are, we've been noticing the kiosks more frequently. Apparently, you pay about a $1, dump in your rice (seems to handle about 20 lbs at a time) and nicely hulled and polished rice shoots out.

For us non-farmers, we can buy our rice at the supermarket or a rice vending machine. The vending machine sells 5Kg & 10Kg of 8 different varieties of rice. The price of rice at the vending machine works out to about $1.25/lb. Very protected market here; absolutely no rice imports from overseas. At customs, in the airport, there's a sign which lists banned import goods: drugs, pornography, guns, swords, and rice! Photos of the rice harvest are at http://photos.yahoo.com/~iverlink