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Rice Cultivation and Pearl S Buck description

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“The whole process of the growing of rice is a cycle of beauty, from the seedbeds, greener than any green on earth, to the last harvested golden sheaf. I was charmed always by every change, and especially by the transplanting, when the dry fields were filled with water and the farm family rolled up the legs of their blue cotton trousers and waded into the water and planted the seedlings neatly and exactly spaced over the fields. The rice grows swiftly, and soon the fields are dry again and the grain stood high and yellow. Then came the harvesting when once more the farm family sallied forth and with hand sickles cut the sheaves, and tied them and stacked them and carried them to the threshing floors in front of the farmhouses. There the sheaves were spread and men and women lifted the swinging bamboo flails and beat out the grain. Women swept up the grain and spread it in winnowing baskets and men tossed it up for the wind to clean. When at last the rice was harvested it was piled into vats made of clean rice straw woven into matting and shaped and tied into containers. There was poetry in every movement of the blue-clad peasants.”

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Buck, Pearl S 1954, ‘My Several Worlds’, Pocket Cardinal, New York.

This is an excerpt from the above book, Pearl S Buck’s autobiography about her years in China. She is the winner of the Pulitzer for ‘The Good Earth’ and the Nobel Prize for literature.

Though this was written in 1954 about the rice harvesting in China in the years 1890s – 1932, it is still almost the exact process to the rice farming of northern Thailand through cultivating first the seedlings in a single plot and then replanting the closely cultivated seedlings in the rest of the plots after flooding them.

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