Rice Rice Baby

We live in a very agricultural area, as evidenced by tractors holding up traffic on the main roads and the distinct smell of cow manure if the wind is just right. But what's so Asian about our agricultural area is that we're surrounded by rice paddies. A few vegetables planted here and there, but almost all the plots of land are used to cultivate rice. Rice everywhere!

When we arrived in Korea in August, the rice was tall and turning golden-colored and ready for harvest in the Fall. The best way to describe the look when the wind blows across the rice paddies is: amber waves of grain. (Funny that rice paddies make me feel patriotic for the United States!) Next we endured a winter of bare fields that were nothing but dead and brown for month after month. Come April things started to get interesting, and I became fascinated by rice.

When Joanie and Darwin were visiting they too were curious about how rice is grown. Joanie is a gardening guru but wasn't totally sure about this process, so I did some research like the megadork that I proudly am.

In springtime, farmers use the vast irrigation network to flood all the fields up to about knee-high. A lot of rice paddies are terraced so they fill one paddy until it overflows, which fills the next lower paddy and so forth. During the filling process, the farmers drive their tractors in the water, tilling the soil. The water doesn't seep down into the soil and the tractors don't sink down into the paddy because the soil is mostly clay.

Then it's time for planting, which is done under water to keep weeds and varmints from spoiling the crop. Seeds can't be used since they'd rot in standing water so instead small seedlings (from a greenhouse) are planted in rows. Right after they're planted, the seedlings are a bright lime green color, and after about a month they turn kelly green as shown in these pictures from our neighborhood:

So there's your little lesson from Farmer Haley. If you aren't asleep at your computer yet, here are some fun facts about rice:

• Rice accounts for one fifth of all calories consumed by people in the world.
• 143 pounds of rice are milled annually for every person on earth.
• Rice farming has been traced back to around 5,000 BC.
• It takes 5,000 liters of water to produce 1 kg of irrigated rice.
• Rice is thrown on newly married couples as a symbol of fertility, luck and wealth. (Unless you're a bride like me who declined the rice, first thought being, "Who would clean all that up?")