Hello Hive
We gathered from the News just after the last week's heavy downpour that a major climate change caused a shift in the weather condition that resulted into a heavy downpour of rain which destroyed alot of our crops at harvest most especially the already dried rice grains 🌾. Throughout Kwara state the unexpected rain caught us unaware on the 25th of November at twilight and continue into the night..
Usually the rain has completely ceased in the month of October and the dry seasons have taking over. After much heavy sun 🌞 our rice grains have all dried up waiting to be harvested. And as I have shown us earlier we started harvest in portions since all the work cannot be done in a day. Having Harvested the grains in some portions this heavy downpour came and you see the damaging effect of water on already drying grains.
First of all we have planted the long grain rice 🌾 this year and as a result they grew so tall and all falling to the ground.
When the grains are well produced they become so heavy that the stems can no longer stay to hold the grains, hence you see them lying in the ground .
While in that state we had rain water beat the dried grains into the swamp
A major portion of the grains got flushed away by the flowing water while some remaining seeds started to rot
The stems became soft and rotten too preventing the threshing of the grains. We did our best to pick up what was remaining which was already wet and needed to be Sun dried before storage if we do not want them to germinate or get rotten in storage.
It was a sad situation having gone through the labour of growing these grains only for this to occur at harvest time but there is nothing we can do about the weather condition.
We are still picking up the remaining grains and harvest will be completed either this weekend or a day or two into next year.