Since December, the sun has rarely appeared here; even if it is hot all day, it rains every night. Well, I can't blame the constant rain because many typhoons passed through the Philippines in December, so it always rains.
Every time I leave our kitchen, I see my father's farm, which has almost as many dead crops as living ones. If you see a rice field with no green growing, it is my father's from brown to top.
This is the result of the non-stop rain and my father has not yet been able to plant rice, so if he throws seeds in the rice field and it rains at night then until the next day then water is restored in the rice field and it takes a long time to disappear so his rice seed die. And when I went there, there was no trace of the rice.
There is no hope that any rice seeds will survive.
He needs to find a few more sacks of rice to make seeds and throw them back into the ground.
The difference between dead rice and rice that has already grown, and it's almost been a month.
My father's nearby rice field planted new seeds yesterday, and here's what they did. Because there was a part of their rice field where the rice seeds died, they almost had the same rice as my father, but my father planted the rice seeds a few days earlier.
This is because the rice plant that has grown will be harvested before a newly planted one. So, with the rice seeds, they lose right away, especially my father because his rice fields are wide. And he needs to spend money on it again; he planted rice on December 24 and has yet to be able to plant again due to the constant rain.
While walking in the embankment I saw live snails and their pink eggs, which they lay in the rice or grass. I'm not sure how their eggs will develop into snails because they're stuck in the rice. However, I remember being happy when I was a kid every time I saw snail eggs because of their bright pink color. However, my father was irritated when there were a lot of snails in our rice field because it meant the snails would break the small rice plants until died.
I also saw some dead snails. It was also because my father used to leave the snails he bought at the market in the ground to die because they are difficult to kill, especially if there is water in the rice field, and they do not die even they are under the mud. If my father was unable to purchase snail medicine or pesticide before, we would take them one by one and put in the sacks or cook them.
My father dislikes grasses, especially when they grow alongside rice. My father needs to buy herbicide to get rid of them, or if his herbicide doesn't work, he pulls them out every day, even when it's hot or rainy. Because they compete for fertilizer with his rice, the weeds will become fatter than the rice.
I even saw a spider spinning a web that it could sleep in all day; I guess, we call it inchik-inchik. This is one of my father's allies in the rice fields because it eats pollinating insects particularly when the rice is about to ripen. That's why I want more spider in the rice fields rather than insects.
I'm hoping that when my father plants rice seeds once more, it won't rain so that the seeds don't die because of water. I'm just writing to express how hard farmers work to produce rice so they can feed their families and fellow citizens. That's not their sacrifice only because theres more before they can plant of rice. The embankment needs to be cleaned due to the dense grass, the land needs to be plowed, a tractor and other equipment are needed to dig the ground, and the comb on the ground used is carabao to plant rice. Farmers make a lot of sacrifices in the hopes that the price of rice won't drop when they harvest Even though it's raining. 🥹 Because sometimes the harvest time here is raining then the buyer will drop the price of rice plant, because of that the farmers are miserable. 🥹
That's all for today, Thankyou for reading and to your unwavering support of my post. Peace and love ! 🫶🏻❤️
All photos are mine.