My students often tell me they eat ‘lice’.
You can see a stroller in the background. I think the reason Korean grandmothers love becoming grandmothers is that they will soon get a handy cart to carry their stuff.
This was the end of a mere 2 hours of rice harvesting. I lifted and carted -in a bigger cart- perhaps two tons of rice. My brother- and father -in-law don’t seem so tired. I guess driving the combine isn’t so tough as carrying the rice.
Honestly, they did work hard, and longer than I. Here, my father-in-law scythes the rice in a corner of the paddy. The combine can’t get into the corners so well, so they are done by hand.
My brother-in-law is driving the combine – a ‘Super Combine’ according to the side panel. Each bag is filled to around 40-50kilos of white rice with the brown seed coat still on it.
Wikipedia has images and info on other combines which make this one look a little less ‘super’:
My brother-in-law had gone off to play volleyball, so my father-in-law brought in a tractor to carry the last 12 bags. If you click to embiggen, you can see my son is getting a ride in the tractor’s scoop.
May 10, 2012 at 9:11 pm |
[...] A lot of rice farming is done with machines but there are many steps to the process so we were busy enough. First, the rice seeds are soaked in some mystery liquid – I presume it was connected with fertilizer or pesticide. Then the seeds are placed in trays and left to sprout until the trays look like they are full of grass sod. This is the first planting. Then, after a month or so, the sod trays are loaded into a machine that plants them in flooded fields and they are left until harvest – with a few visits for spraying pesticide and such. Around October, the rice is harvested. [...]