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My Experience as a Rice Farmer

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Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#61

Post by macleginn »

seer wrote: post #48
aurareturn wrote: post #5

As a child, I grew up in a village in China and our family farmed rice. It was mostly my mom who was doing the farming while my dad worked in the city. Some things I remember: * Seeing hired buffalos tilling our fields * Playing with frogs and catching tadpoles in the fields * Someone with a machine that removes the husks would come to our village during harvest * The smell of rice fields. I recently smelled it again…

Is this the “city experience” in general or specifically for the United States? It famously has very poor urbanism so might not mean the same as in Europe for example. I have grown up in rural Russia in the 80s and that was also similar - a forest started 50m from our house and I would just get lost there from time to time - not fun for my parents but magical for me. Then we moved to the middle of a European capital…

A lot of areas in Western Europe are either completely deforested or have very weird low-density half-dead wooded areas, especially Germany. One has to go all the way to Poland/Serbia/Bulgaria to get a real forest experience again.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#62

Post by AussieWog93 »

lostlogin wrote: post #18
TurdF3rguson wrote: post #8

That suitcase of rice story though, I'm finding it problematic lol. - First of all a 95% increase in the price of rice means it less than doubled which is no big deal. - I think maybe you meant it 20x'ed ? If so I will just eat corn until it comes down (my house eats 100kg of rice in a month) - Can a suitcase of rice even get through customs?

> my house eats 100kg of rice in a month What’s the maths on that? A cup of rice would seem a fair bit for a person for a meal. A cup is about 200g. That’s 500 portions a month. 5.5 people for 3 meals a day?

A lot of Asian households are multi-generational, so the maths definitely checks out there.

I'm putting my money on more people (8-10) but eating less than 200g per meal (1/2 cup uncooked, ~100g for most people)

EDIT, just saw sibling, that's impressive for 5 people, unless the dogs eat a lot of rice too.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#63

Post by numpad0 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #22
TheDong wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed it's a roughly 2x increase (5kg supermarket bag from 2000 jpy to 4000). Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc.

> Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc. There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like meat. Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other foods.

I think Japanese rice-centric framing of meals is also of note, it's not universal across East Asia - I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China, but it's just a menu item in Japan.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#64

Post by kubanczyk »

fer wrote: post #11
anonymous908213 wrote: post #2

This was mostly a nice read, I do enjoy these kinds of slice-of-life blogs. I think it might have been a bit better without making claims about the economic future and history of rice farming or whatever, if the author doesn't even speak the language it's unlikely they have any real insight to offer and whatever shallow information they got off a random Youtube video is liable to be spreading misinformation that misl…

How is that communistic? The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt. It's not dissimilar to pre-1929 kulaks, though the kulaks were encouraged/enabled to become a relatively wealthy/middle class peasantry who employed people and were directly involved in the production without owning large swathes of land, acting as a kind of a social dampener against a revolution. Unsurprisin…

> The reasoning behind Gentan was that a landless peasantry was more likely to revolt.

So, it was an anti-revolutionary policy. Which at that time of history worked as well as an anti-communist policy.

> Unsurprisingly the Soviet Union killed the kulak model and moved to collective farming[0], which was arguably actually communistic.

Soviet Union, whatever it had preached, implemented state capitalism - concentration of the means of production under a single owner.

It's important for me to use words precisely. If somebody implies, for example, that capitalism is the opposite of communism, that's just snatching the words and waving them like banners.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#65

Post by [deleted] »

adrianN wrote: post #25
sheept wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My one hope for AI, robotics, self driving cars, is that they can enable people in cities to migrate back to rural places. Wouldn't it be better, at least for the Earth, for everyone to live in cities? This way, more of the world can remain fairly untouched by humans, and it could still remain easy accessible from the city for recreational purposes. The solarpunk ideal of living a rural life requires more road infr…

That is my understanding too, but many people equate rural life with „natural“. Unfortunately the rural environment is all but natural. The cultural landscape that has been engineered over centuries all but displaced true wilderness and is largely devoid of biodiversity. The better we become at industrial agriculture, the worse the situation is.

[deleted]

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#66

Post by FlyingSnake »

aurareturn wrote: post #5

As a child, I grew up in a village in China and our family farmed rice. It was mostly my mom who was doing the farming while my dad worked in the city. Some things I remember: * Seeing hired buffalos tilling our fields * Playing with frogs and catching tadpoles in the fields * Someone with a machine that removes the husks would come to our village during harvest * The smell of rice fields. I recently smelled it again…

I grew up in similar environment in rural central India and I (half)jokingly say farming was my first real job. We rarely planted rice, but I have vivid memory of helping my father plant the rice saplings in the muddy puddles in my farm.

I am always skeptical of urban people wanting to move back to little villages to do farming. Farming is a back-breaking and a tough job. You are exposed to all the vagaries of nature. The market forces are also not always in your favour. It is another version of "quit-job-and-open-a-coffee-shop" fallacy.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#67

Post by thaumasiotes »

numpad0 wrote: post #63
thaumasiotes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether that's a big deal or not depends on the person, their finances, how much rice the family eats, etc etc. There's a nasty interaction among those concerns: as the basic staple food of the diet, rice is consumed in larger amounts by poorer people who can't afford real food, like meat. Which means that a spike in the price of rice is effectively targeted at people who can't afford to substitute other foods.

I think Japanese rice-centric framing of meals is also of note, it's not universal across East Asia - I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China, but it's just a menu item in Japan.

> I mean, allegedly, bowl of rice next to ramen is meme worthy to people from China

I can't personally attest to that, but it certainly makes sense. Rice meals vs noodle meals are a fairly fundamental split in Chinese cuisine.

(It doesn't make rice any less of a staple food.)

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#68

Post by aledevv »

sdevonoes wrote: post #56
aledevv wrote: post #46

> Doing a day of manual labour, chatting shit, then going for the onsen and some BBQ and beers is far better than grinding away at some enterprise SaaS that will probably disappear in a few years. I particularly agree with this statement. I don't know why manual work has been so denigrated over the last century. We believed that office labor was more important and healthier than manual labor. I don't think so. As a d…

I’d love to do manual labor as long as: I have a decent house, decent health insurance, can afford decent food/stuff, can afford taking sabbaticals, can afford getting sick and not losing my income, can afford decent education for kids, etc. Unfortunately, many of us are chained to the modern way of life.

@sdevonoes What do you do for work?

ps: Unfortunately I agree with you.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#69

Post by adrian_b »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #2

This was mostly a nice read, I do enjoy these kinds of slice-of-life blogs. I think it might have been a bit better without making claims about the economic future and history of rice farming or whatever, if the author doesn't even speak the language it's unlikely they have any real insight to offer and whatever shallow information they got off a random Youtube video is liable to be spreading misinformation that misl…

The communist policy everywhere was to rob the small farmers and small business owners of everything they owned and force them to become quasi-serfs.

The socialist/communist economy is the final extreme stage of monopolistic capitalism, towards which USA and other Western countries have been continuously evolving during the last quarter of century. The economy of USA in 2026 is much more similar to the economy of one of the former socialist countries in 1976 than it resembles the economy of USA in 1976.

Small farmers and businessmen were the main enemies of communism, everywhere.

So what Japan enacted was indeed a good anti-communist policy.

Fighting against big companies and supporting small businesses is the opposite of communist policies.

There were a lot of great differences between true communism and what the communists themselves claimed communism to be. There were also a lot of great differences between true communism and what communism has been claimed to be in USA.

Source: I have grown up in a country occupied by communist invaders, so I know what true communism is.

Re: My Experience as a Rice Farmer

#70

Post by FlyingSnake »

dilawar wrote: post #36
aurareturn wrote: post #5

As a child, I grew up in a village in China and our family farmed rice. It was mostly my mom who was doing the farming while my dad worked in the city. Some things I remember: * Seeing hired buffalos tilling our fields * Playing with frogs and catching tadpoles in the fields * Someone with a machine that removes the husks would come to our village during harvest * The smell of rice fields. I recently smelled it again…

I grew up in North India, close to Ramganga river (Jim Corbet park is on this river). We grew rice in addition to sugar cane. The smell of paddy (and also of large quantity of cooked rice) is absolutely soothing for me and it brings back memory. During my grandfather time, it was very common for a crab to grab your fingers when you are planting the paddy. My father would chase turtles and large frogs when he was a ki…

Honestly the rice varieties in India should be promoted and protected more. The diversity and health benefits of these varieties is immense.
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