Bangkok, November 21,2017

The growing of rice. This is my third time trying to get this page out to you.
Rice needs lots of water. Where there is plenty of water, farmers usually harvest three crops, a year. The area where my friends live is dry, so they get but one crop. Rice farming for about 90 percent of the farmers is very labor intensive. The season begins when rice seeds are planted in a field of water, the seeds just thrown at random into the ground. After the young plants grow about six inches, they are pulled out by hand and replanted in neat rows with the plants about eight inches apart. The new planting is actually a cluster of six to ten stalks, which grow to a height of about three feet. These rows are up to a kilometer long, depending on the field dimensions. A rice field is level, and can be easily flooded if the field is near a canal system meant for this purpose. If not, rain becomes the only moisture, so those farmers with no water system are at natures mercy. They wait for the monsoons to come...the planting timed for that wet season. One can fly over the country side and see the land flooded for miles. My friends have no rice if the monsoons come too soon, or too late. After about 90 days, the rice is ready to harvest. This is a backbreaking process. Farmers using sickles cut the clusters, one at a time about eight inches from the ground. When they have an arm full, in is stacked in neat rows to further dry for a few days. After that, the stacks are baled and taken to a plant where the rice is threshed into what you see in the store. My friends have 40 acres, which are harvested this way. It takes on average, about 30 days to harvest the 40 acres, two people working twelve hours a day.
This year, I did not go to the orphanage at Pattaya to work,but members of my "Thai Family", donate rice to the orphanage. I gave the family three thousand Baht, the equivalent of 120  Canadian dollars, which is what they pay to hire someone each year. That will hire a second person for thirty days, or until the rice is harvested. The family member doing their work is the mother of my friends, and she is 56 years old. It is the women that harvest the rice; I have yet to see a man in a rice field....anyplace in Asia.