Hello Hive

We are currently transplanting rice and this is one of the hardest farm work I dread the most. If not because rice has been one of the most useful grains around us, I would have done away with farming rice a long time ago.

Each year we harvest about 10-12 bags of the 50kg weight of the this particular rice grains, it often serve my family meals for at least 6month. We could have as well eating it for longer periods if we do not get to share with friends and extended family.

Transplanting rice is a hard task, you have to say bent over all day placing some amount of the seedlings into the ground at different intervals.

This is one of the works that gets me sick very easily, first is the dirty swamp very much easy for one to catch an infection. Most of the times I have to stay on anti prophylaxis drugs to prevent me from getting sick.

Another ugly experience is the cold.
The swamp is often very cold and am not familiar with using boot to work. The boots could get heavy, easily caught in the swamp and difficult to pull out. Hence I rather prefer not to wear a boot. One more thing that scared me in this water is the presence of one blood sucking worm like that. It looks like the filaria worm and before you can count one or two it pierces the skin and seeks to penetrate the body. These are the things we often lookout for whenever we are engaging in rice transplanting.

Transplanting is also time consuming compared to when we are planting the grains. It is much easier to plant rice than to transplant, for planting we just dig the ground and put the grains, but for this we have to first remove the grains from nursery before we move them into the farms, use either cutlass or stick to dig holes at intervals before we then insert the seedlings carefully.

This location of our farm gets easily flooded easily and it's often submerge we have never been able to plant this portion of the field before it gets taking over by water.
With all the drawbacks and challenges of transplanting rice we still engage in it yearly because it is the major food we eat and the grains that produce us much crops compared to the others.