One of the most beautiful periods in the Red River delta of Vietnam is the harvesting time. Starting from the first week of June 2016, farmers in the whole delta have collected “heaven’s gifts” from the fields, where they have put all knowledge, labourhood, and hopes on.
“Golden fields”, “Stunning”, “Extraodinary” or “Happiness” are words commonly heard from field visitors. Talking to the farmers, RIICE experts have learnt exciting stories such as “how to avoid rats”, “how to select a suitable variety for this field”, “why do we cut the rice a bit early”…
Rice cultivation has been strongly supported by advanced technologies like transplanting machines, harvesting machines, labour-machining exchange. Somewhere, down to the fields, manual cuttings are observed but not popular. However, post harvets processing facilities are still poorly obtained. One could easily find farmers drying their newly-cut rice on the village roads, in the pavement or event surface of the national highways.
Mr. Tinh, a farmer who talked to us just explained: “We have to cut young rice because we don’t want the typhoon or wind bust to collapse our product. As it is wet, and we don’t have large yard to sun-dry, we need to use the village roads for it”.
When the sun is going down behind the village, hanging over the old bamboo ranges, thick smokes start flying from the fields where they just worked on in the daytime. Burning rice residuals seems to be a habit of people in the country sides.
“62-70 quintals per hecta is what we’ve early expected and we are happy with it. Therefore, we burn rice residuals to celebrate and fertilize the fields”, said Mrs. Ngoan, an old lady farmer.
Source: RIICE Vietnam (www.riicevn.org)
RIICE is a sister project of ASEAN Sustainable Agifood Systems.
