Hello Hive
Our long-awaited rice harvest has suddenly begun as we are about to put the sickle to harvest my own family rice grains suddenly. We have earlier wished to leave this for the end of November so that the seeds can become more mature, but there is pressure on the harvest currently.
I mean, who on earth visits a rice farm in the middle of the night to steal people's crops? If it were corn that can be easily plucked or tubers of yams that are easily uprooted from the ground, I wouldn't be bothered so much, but this is rice grain, one in which you have to cut with the sickle first, then beat it against a drum to remove the grains before taking them home.
It is so disturbing to see that people now go extra miles to steal people's rice grains. And since this cannot be done during the daytime, they endure the discomfort of working in the rice field at night just to steal some grains.
Why won't people steal when there is so much inflation and hunger in the land? And most importantly, these people are too lazy to do the hard work and labor of farming. A lot of people here see farming as a dirty profession with so much hard labor. They will never engage in such exercise, yet they wish to have enough food on their table.
Everybody wants to leave farming/agriculture to the government, believing that only the government has the capacity to engage in mechanized farming and produce enough food for its citizens. Not so many of our governments are engaged in farming; hence, a very small percentage of the village people and local farmers have been the ones producing the foods eaten in the country. Bulk of the rice we also eat is imported mostly from China and other countries.
We are importing food crops and grains when there is fertile soil for everyone to engage in farming and produce their own crops. The exchange rate was on an important high, and hence it directly affected the price of staples in the market, leaving so many people stranded. Only a few of us will be escaping the pangs of hunger as soon as our harvest is completed and we have stored some good quantity of grains.
Before today, we often divided our rice harvesting task into sections. There is the cutting, beating, sorting, and bagging (reaping, threshing, cleaning, hauling, and bagging as the more appropriate terms).
We have often engage in cutting the rice and arranging them for one day just like this one
Only to return the following day for the threshing , cleaning and bagging. But for this year our processes have to be re-organized. If you cut and leave the rice in the manner above, it makes it easy for thieves to beat the over the night and take it all home.
This year we have to do the work in bits and only harvest what we can process per day. The cutting threshing and all the other processes must be done on thesame day so that the grains can equally be carried home.
Some portion of our rice field are still immature and greenish I'm color, they are yet to ripen up for harvest but we have to start working gradually paradventure they will get ready along the line. There is so much pressure on us to harvest this and that before different categories of stealing or destruction via bush burning happens.