Rice is Life

 This is rice, thriving in the field. What has to happen for it to reach this point? Seed is put aside from last year's harvest, planted densely and grown into seedlings in a protected area, taken to the flooded paddies after they have been prepared, and most often, transplanted by hand into the mud beneath the standing water.

Leveling the paddy

Transplanting seedlings into paddy - women's work in the world of rice.

This video was taken last week in very rural southern India, may show the last generation of women to transplant rice in this age-old manner. Watch and listen to their call-and-response singing as they do this back-breaking work. How many centuries and in how many places on the face of earth have people sung like this to make the work flow? This kind of manual labor may soon be replaced by machines. The women we spoke to would not be sorry to see their children escape from the necessity to toil in this way.

We watched as this small tractor-like machine planted many rows at once into a field of soft mud that will later be flooded.

Harvest is still another process involving intensive manual labor, but is more frequently now being done by large combine machines. Here a man is so loaded up with rice straw that only his lower legs can be seen. He will walk a great distance to take the straw to a stack for use as animal feed after the grain has been threshed from the stalks.

                                   A team of oxen pull a hay wagon down a dusty road.

Workers load bagged rice onto trucks to be taken to the mills, where the bran must be polished off. Bran contains enough oil that the grain would go rancid quickly in the tropical heat if milling were not done soon after harvest.

                                                  Sunset over a harvested field.