Harvesting rice

It was starting to appear that harvesting rice was an event completed by mice in the middle of the night when no one was watching. Each day as we rode to work or back more fields were harvested, but we hadn't seen a single harvester. Then a few days ago we saw one and then two and then more. The rice is now being harvested furiously, many fields are bare, and what's great is that we managed to get some pictures of this fleeting, shy animal called a rice combine harvester.

One of the harvesters roaming around Luodong at the moment

Why is it called a combine harvester? Because it combines the three traditional stages of grain harvesting, reaping, threshing and winnowing into one step, saving a lot of time, and allowing farmers to spend more time drinking beer or eating stinky tofu at the local night market.

It's such a neat process, it doesn't even hurt too many of the rice plants. It's tracks are narrower than the distance between two rows of rice plants (planted by a rice planting machine).

The only damage it makes to the field is on either end where it turns. It has a limited storage capacity so after two trips up and down the paddy it must stop and offload.

Offloading the rice

It's an amazingly quick little machine. It looked like it took 15 minutes to harvest a really large rice paddy. It was going at an impressive pace.

The rice paddies of Yilan

Growing sticky rice funTastic!!

Being in the Republic of China (Taiwan) you expect to see a lot of rice eaten and grown. In DaJia, where we first lived in Taiwan, there were only a few rice paddies and lots of taro plantations. We worked so hard and our commute was short and through the town centre, so we didn't see much of the rice. Here in Yilan there is rice everywhere and we have enjoyed watching the life cycle, every morning we drive a few kilometres through numerous ever changing paddies.

Through the rainy winter months the rice paddies looked like big square dams of black water. The water levels rose and fell depending on the rain. Sometimes they were just mud patches, other times they were overflowing. Then as spring arrived they planted furiously. Rice is planted in perfectly neat rows with an automatic planter, something like a tractor with a seed sowing attachment. This tractor has special wheels that allow it not to sink in the mud, they look like water wheel paddles.

We then watched the little seedlings grow at light speed into big plants, changing the landscape in a few weeks from a black water world into large fields of green. The farmers often staggered the planting so that the rice ripens a few weeks apart, you can see the result now, as the harvest is coming in. Some fields are still green, others are golden yellow, sagging with heavy sheaths of rice, others have already been harvested.

Almost ready to harvest

This is farmland in Taiwan, with power lines and 5 story buildings far in the background.

You can see fields of short cut rice plant stumps with bales or stacks of rice straw on the dried out paddies. The surface looks like dry caked mud, but the water table isn't far down, here and there, tractors have broken down into the mud below. There seems to be some disagreement about what to do with the straw. There are different methods of baling or stacking it, some farmers burn it, others put it on a huge heap.

This is one method of collecting the rice straw after the harvest

Another way to bale rice straw

Some older paddies already have the second growth of the rice coming up. Rice can be harvested twice in a season, so we will watch the second half of the life cycle from now on. 

I guess this paddy was harvested 2 weeks ago, note the second growth beginning to show

In South Africa agriculture is something that is done on farms far away from the cities. In Taiwan there is so little arable land that it is necessary to use all available space to the max. This means that even in towns and cities land is cultivated and we now live in "rural" Taiwan, so vegetation is everywhere.

Scootering through the fields, note the raised freeway in the background