Since Male Farmers Are Hardheaded, Let's Cultivate The Female!

We Filipinos are very respectful of women, I'm proud to say – unlike most cultures. Why do we not encourage the women to become farmers? We honor them much. It's the backbreaking work, sometimes the night fieldwork when you want to make sure you have irrigation water all over the field for your rice. 

Irrigation. I'm the agriculturist around here, and the son of a farmer, so why did I not realize this a long time ago? It takes a lady, Caryl Levine, to tell this gentleman that, "Worldwide, most fresh water withdrawals are for agriculture, and the lion's share of that water goes to irrigate rice." I'm quoting from Miss Caryl's article "Changing How Rice Is Grown Around The World" published 22 April 2019 by the Fair World Project (fairworldproject.org).

"And this comes at a time when major rice-producing nations are suffering from increasing water scarcity." A major reason is El Niño; another major reason is that farmers are prodigal sons with irrigation water. Like my father Lakay Disiong was; he did not know any better – neither his agriculturist sons, plural. I graduated from the UP College of Agriculture and my brother Emilio graduated earlier from the Araneta Institute of Agriculture – both agriculturists were ignorant about the proper irrigation of rice.

Continuously, or even just continually flooding rice is a lazy man's way of getting rid of weeds and suspect pests that lay eggs on the soil. Miss Caryl says:

Flooded rice fields are also a major contributor to global warming. When soils are continuously covered in water and deprived of oxygen, they release methane gas which is a more powerful greenhouse gas in the short term than carbon dioxide.

So, before we complain about global warming, let's look under the feet of our farmers first!

On second thought, since Filipino farmers are male, maybe it's time to change the sex of our farmers – I mean, let's encourage more female farmers! But: Stop the male from telling the female farmers what to do in the manner of farming rice.

Can we grow rice with much less water? We should. Can we? Yes we can!

Now then, Miss Caryl says:

The good news is that there are solutions, like the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), which we have dubbed "More Crop Per Drop" so that consumers better understand what it is all about – essentially producing more rice with less water.

We must sow the seeds of modern water management in growing rice.

And that is where SRI comes in. With SRI, you sow less rice (seeds) and yet you harvest from 25% to 100% more rice (grains).

So, is SRI good for women farmers? Miss Caryl says yes. "With 80-90% fewer and lighter seedlings to transport and transplant, their burden is drastically reduced." In SRI, you transplant when seedlings are only 2 leaves old, not much older as usual. All in all, she says, SRI reduces field labor by as much as 47 times 8-hour days.

Night & day, I'd rather have love's labor's lost on my lady love!517