You're Looking At Both Despair & Hope
MANILA: Once: Forewarned is forearmed.
A senior editor at IRRI, Leah Barona-Cruz, wrote last week a news-advisory: "Joint action from ASEAN, other rice-growing countries, key to managing looming food crisis" (14 April 2016, Rice Today, ricetoday.irri.org). She said:
(We) may be confronted with a global food crisis similar to the 2007-08 crisis as a result of the current El Niño episode. It is imperative that tight cooperation be secured (now) among the biggest rice-producing and -consuming nations to stem or manage the crisis should such emerge.
Ms Leah quoted Director General of IRRI Matthew Morell as saying, "Regional cooperation is essential to manage a food crisis." So, IRRI is now calling for Asia to unite "for maximum impact" – Asean countries Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam; Asean+3 countries China, Japan and South Korea; and India. "Collectively, 90% of the world's rice is produced in Asia," said Ms Leah. IRRI was reminding Asia that "IRRI is the resource of the Region," meaning it was standing by to provide technical assistance.
3 cheers for the IRRI people! Now, let me also cheer for that photograph of theirs.
Twice: Forewarned is forearmed.
I am a cock-eyed optimist, always has been. Now look at the image above again (I got it from Ms Leah's webpage) and think both like a pessimist and an optimist – this joke and/or proverb I think I memorized in high school yet more than 50 years ago from the Reader's Digest:
What's the difference between an optimist and a pessimist?
The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist the hole.
The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist the hole.
At the image above, I say you are probably looking at the hole, while I'm looking at the donut. Despair & Hope:
Hole of Despair: Note the wide cracks that extend everywhere; they are the perfect picture of drought. They are enough to discourage you, even if you're not the farmer. Since you are not expecting rain anytime soon, this scene will become bleaker. The plants will dry up and die.
That's half of the picture.
Donut of Hope: Note the mostly green rice plants growing alongside the parched section of the field. They should be enough to encourage you even if you are not an agriculturist. You hope that the moisture left in the field will last until harvest time. Please look carefully at the top parts of the rice plants, and you will see panicles showing and growing. There's gold in them dar hills! The harvest, if not super-abundant, will be sufficient unto the day thereof.
What kinder disposition of grace would we envy? Life is sufficient unto the day thereof. The sun warms. The rain refreshes. All of night is a cover for tenderness. We reflect on the stars. We find surcease from our troubles. We admire the crescent and the full moon. In the morning, life bubbles. We are asked to witness the disappearance of shadow. We walk the Earth in respect. We watch the bird circle its nest. We dare to sing a song and find our voice to be sweet. And this is not vanity, but the fullness of virtue upon a landscape, pressing against the fragility of mind in order to make it strong.
"Life is sufficient unto the day thereof." I prefer to focus on the background, the growing rice, still green. Look closely now; among the top leaves are showing panicles already out and bending with the weight of young grains. What those plants signify is that there is enough moisture yet in the soil, hopefully to last till harvest time.
Not only that. Note that in the foreground, on top of those cracks are a few grasses growing well, which means there really is moisture in the cracked soil.
There is a lesson to be learned here, and I don't want you to miss it.
You know, it was love at first sight the very moment I saw this photograph. Serendipity. I wasn't looking for it, but when I saw it, I knew it was perfect for my purpose, heaven-sent. If you have a very creative mind, serendipity is your handmaiden. Call it intuition if you like.
"What kinder disposition of grace would we envy?" At once, I saw it as a picture of death and life. "In the morning, life bubbles. We are asked to witness the disappearance of shadow." Yes, this photograph shows the shadow of death – and also the shadow of life. In fact, it tells me there is life after death!
Yes, you're looking at both despair and hope. Despair is a choice; Hope is also a choice.
Even granting that the eternal optimist in me is wrong this time, that there will be zero harvest, what this scene today shows is a lesson in managing water for the crop. I have written about this many times (try my latest essay, "BIAG Is Water Farming," 16 April 2016, BIAG, blogspot.in), but this photograph is a perfect excuse to tell my story again: The essence of agriculture is water farming.
You see, even in a soil as dry as this one, there is moisture; there is water even in parched lands. Why did this field lose much of its original moisture from irrigation? Because there was nothing in the topsoil to prevent the evaporation of water from the soil, as simple as that.
You can imagine this field before it was cultivated for rice – it was full of weeds, not to mention the crop leftover, rice stalks still standing – before everything was burned. Burning rice straw in the field (clean culture) is a common bad habit of farmers I have seen along the highway from Bulacan to La Union; I always feel sorry for those farmers because they don't know that they are burning away the fat of their land.
Now comes the choice of what I call grass farming, which I explained in the essay I mentioned above. I will summarize it here: Right after the last cropping season, with all those weeds and the rice leftover unburnt, the farmer could have rotavated the weeds along with the crop refuse and, in so doing, mixed them with the topsoil all over the field. What he would have created would be a surface mulch. As the mulch decayed, the organic matter in it would have released moisture and nutrients to the soil. Repeating grass manuring in the next season, and so on, he would never have run out of soil moisture for his rice.
Thrice: Forewarned is forearmed.
The farmer has to do grass farming during the rainy season, so that his field will be ready for the dry season. That is, you think of the solution before the problem appears. Isn't this what they call climate change adaptation? You prepare for the drought.
Life after death, yes. When you have a grass manure all over your field, the dead organic matter will give life to your crop!
And so, with James Maltese:
We dare to sing a song of virtue upon a landscape, pressing against the fragility of mind in order to make it strong.
Comments
Post a Comment