» the one and two acre farms with earth to hold the water. Many a mountain slope glitters with fiower and grass rimmed rice—ponds, as if set with silver mirrors. Wouldn’t you like to see such pretty water farms?
The rice plants are started in forcing beds in the village. While they are sprouting the fields are broken up with mattocks or spades, smoothed over and flooded with water. Into such fields a whole village of families wade. They poke holes in the mud with sticks on their fingers, and set the plants in rows a foot or eighteen inches apart, and clear under the water. In a few days the grass-like green blades shoot up into the sunlight. Each root spreads and sends up several stalks, so the field is covered and looks not unlike a field of young oats, except for the glimmer of water among the stems. When well started the water is let out into the ditches, the field is weeded, the soil loosened and the water turned on again. Flooding and weeding alternate, until the straw begins to turn yellow. Then the water is drained away, and the crop ripens in the sun.
The rice is cut, straw by straw, with a hand sickle. It is threshed by pulling the heads through a saw-toothed frame. It is beaten with flails to free the husks, and cleaned of the tight-fitting brown skin in rude hand mills. Only the rice that is to be sold in the cities is sent to mills to be cleaned between millstones, and polished on skin-covered rollers into shining white grains.
Rice is the bread of hundreds of millions of yellow and brown people. If you could see how hard they all work, in countless tiny fields, in wet, hot lands, you would be glad if they all had a Dai Goku to help and to cheer them. They have no big, strong horses as we have in our wheat fields, no sulky plows and harrows and reapers, on which the workers can ride comfortably, no steam threshers and mills. Most of them work with the rudest tools, and with their bare hands. Some have clumsy, slow animals. In japan are shaggy, pack ponies shod with rice—straw pads of shoes; and now and then a little wooden-wheeled cart is seen, but the drivers have to walk. In northern China, donkeys are used for pack horses. In southern China, Burma and the Philippine Islands are water buffaloes for plowing, dragging solid-wheeled carts, and working treadmill pumps. But oh, if you could see the big crops that are raised—an acre or two growing food for a family for a whole year—you would think we might learn a great deal about scientific farming from people who can seldom read for write.
