Xizhou Shangshui Friendly Agriculture Co. -- Paddy Field Wetland Project

Besides my work at Li Xiang Paradise, as a pear-orchard hand I also borrowed two fen of land from my family this year to trial-plant one crop of Taikeng 16 (Taiwan Keng 16) nontoxic rice, in preparation for the "water-field wetland" project that Xizhou Shangshui Agricultural Products Company will promote next crop season with biodiversity as its goal. Because of my fear of rice blast in the first crop season, I did not dare apply too much fertilizer in the early growth stage, and the rice indeed looked "red" (not green enough) to the point that neighboring farmers could not stand it and spoke up out of a sense of justice. What country people fear most is, first, having no money, and second, gossip; as soon as my parents got wind of it, they indeed immediately launched a bombing campaign of words at me, and this kind of story happens again and again at the boundary between nontoxic and conventional farmland, almost without fail. I simply made up my mind to keep testing with less nitrogen fertilizer, and as a result the rice tillers were almost all under twenty stems, and even I felt a bit anxious looking at it.

Unexpectedly, around Qingming Festival this year, the weather happened to be exactly the kind of unstable, suddenly cold then hot, cloudy then clear weather that favors rice blast, and on top of that, the very important field-drying period after the tillering stage happened to fall during continuous drizzle, so it was impossible to use dry soil to block the rice's excessive vegetative growth. Thus news that rice blast was raging across Taiwan, China made it onto the news pages, and I heard that someone in the village sprayed pesticide more than three times and still could not necessarily bring the disease under control. I could not help breaking into a cold sweat; no matter how low the yield, it was still better than the whole field dying of disease, and besides, if after persisting for a month or so I ended up having to spray pesticide at the final moment to survive, then everything before that would have been bitter effort for nothing.

And then on this very weekend an extremely heavy rain warning was issued, with heavy rain mixed with lightning, and natural nitrogen fertilizer just fell into the rice field like that. If the plants continued to grow vigorously and rank, together with full rice ears, it was very likely the plants would lodge and die under the torrential rain, and I could not help once again feeling fortunate that I had not applied extra nitrogen fertilizer earlier out of a greedy desire for small gains. I also came to understand that the benefit of nontoxic agriculture, besides the fact that agricultural products are relatively safer, also lies in treating Heaven as a partner; the relationship between farmers and Heaven is an attempt at cooperation rather than confrontation, so one is less likely, like farmers who superstitiously rely on pesticides and chemical fertilizers, to often be so angry that their teeth itch while gazing at the sky and sighing.

So let us wait and observe how Xizhou Shangshui Friendly Agricultural Products Company will pray to Heaven and join forces with Heaven in the next rice crop.