My mother is already over eighty years old, yet she still works in the field and handles farmwork everyday.Either she’s taking care of our vegetable garden, planting greens, gourds, melons and beans, or she’s cultivating some empty plots by the field side or near the irrigation ditches to grow peanuts, maize and sweet potatoes.But the most important task is growing rice, season after season.

  Although my mother is still quite hale and hearty, there’s no denying her old age.Besides, she’s a woman of stout build, which puts an additional strain on her body.Her feet tend to get sore easily, her heart’s enlarged and she quickly gets short of breath.She’s not as strong physically as she used to be, her movements have become slower and she often needs to sit down.

  That’s why she’s recently sighing a lot, saying that she’s the only woman her age left in the entire village, “and I’ve been standing up and working since I was young, until I couldn’t stand upright anymore and had to bend down and squat for work.These days, I can neither stand nor squat for long, but I’m still working, though I have to sit down for it now.”

  Taiwan’s main crop is wet rice, and my mother has been busy with its production since she was a young woman, for a full sixty years.And it’s been twenty years since I returned to my hometown to work as a teacher and help my mother with the farming, time that rushed by quickly.Every time I hear my mother sigh, many images come to my mind as I recall the evolution of rice-growing technology, the many changes in agricultural policy over the years, and my mother’s life of constant sweat and toil, memories that are all closely connected.

  With the arrival of the industrial age, all aspects of rice farming were affected by mechanization, including: pre-soaking the seeds, growing shoots, preparing the soil and ploughing the field, transplanting the shoots, weeding, fertilizing, irrigating, spraying pesticides, cutting and drying.Gradually, each of these onerous and strenuous tasks required less and less human and animal power, on which everything had relied originally, and today most of the heavy labor is done by machines.As my mother says, it has certainly made work a lot easier.And the heavy taxation and various other forms of exploitation that farmers formerly had to endure have also largely become a thing of the past.

  However, you won’t be able to appreciate the hardships and troubles of the days gone by, or the new challenges and difficulties facing farmers today, if you haven’t experienced them yourself, or made some effort to gain a deeper understanding.

  The soil in Taiwan generally yields two rice crops a year.Because of climatic differences, cropping patterns vary somewhat as you move from the south to the north.

  In central Taiwan, the transplanting of the young shoots for the first cropping season is done around the Chinese New Year.About one month before this, the rice seeds are pre-soaked and then the seedlings are raised.At the same time, the fields are ploughed and the soil is being prepared.This happens to be the coldest time of the year, yet the farmers have to get up in the wee hours of the morning to go and work in the fields, regardless of the cold water in the paddies.

  For every fen (roughly 970 square meters or almost 10 ares) of land you need about ten jin or Taiwanese catty (one jin is 600 grams) of rice seeds, which are soaked in a water trough for three or four days.Then they are taken out of the water, spread out on the ground and covered with sacks of cloth to maintain the right temperature.They are turned over once every morning and evening and sprinkled with water to keep them moist.After about a week, the seeds will have germinated, and that’s when they are sown thickly in the already prepared rice seedling beds.

  Not only do the seedlings need more time to grow at the end of winter, they are also likely to be spoiled by the rime and cold, especially when the temperatures drop during a cold wave.Therefore the farmers have to hurry to the seedling beds in the dim light of early morning to splash the young shoots with water.This way the hoarfrost is removed from the shoots to avoid that they become blighted when the sunlight thaws the frost.

  After thin, transparent plastic sheets gained widespread popularity, many farmers began to use them as a protective cover for their seedling beds.They are put on in the evening, but still have to be taken off again in the morning because the young shoots will become limp and drooping if they don’t get any direct sunlight.

While the seedlings are being cultivated, the soil in the paddies is ploughed and turned, lumps of soil are being crushed and the field surface is leveled.For each and every of these steps different tools, and the help of oxen, are required.The farmers would lead the animals, the animals would pull the plough or other implements, and . . . .