Tony Boys: Photo Essay Of A Rural Japanese City

Tony Boys has published a longer (and much funnier) essay on the trip he and I did earlier this week in Ibaraki prefecture. He has lots of details and photos over at his Candobetter blog: Photo essay of a rural Japanese city. Quote:

Actually, as we came out of the house, I saw that the farmer who is now growing a crop of upland rice (i.e. a rice variety that does not need to be grown in a wet paddy field) right next to my house had turned up on his morning round of his fields. We went over and said hello and I took out my camera and snapped him right there. The evening before, Martin and I had passed by another of his fields which is on my regular dog walk. The field is a bit less that one-tenth of a hectare and is now covered with a dense growth of soybeans. It's very 'clean', but it's interesting how it got that way. Since I walk our dogs along the same route nearly every day between about four and five in the afternoon, I had seen what had happened in the field over the few weeks since the soy had been planted. The farmer had been out there with a tiny hand-pushed machine (like a small manual lawn mower about 20 or 25 centimetres wide) almost every day, slowly and labouriously, and with meticulous care, removing anything green in the rows between the soybean plants. Sometimes he was just walking up and down between the rows, with his eyes on the ground, occasionally bending down to pluck out a weed. Only once in the two weeks or so that I walked by the field every day did we greet each other, because he was concentrating so hard on what he was doing that he probably didn't notice me, and I didn't want to disturb his concentration by calling out to him.

Martin and I agreed as we walked the dogs that this man's work is now being replaced by herbicide-resistant GE [Genetically Engineered, or GMO] soybeans ... (There is NO commercial planting of GE soy in Japan.)

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