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First, let me apologize to my three readers for the length of time between posts. I have been busy with fieldwork, and have not had time to write new posts. On the bright side, this post is the first to include video of some of the farmers who I am working with. The video embedded below is a montage of the steps involved in preparing the seedbed for a rice nursery, from which seedlings will be later transplanted to other fields. This also illustrates one of the solutions some farmers have used in response to the early flooding in August.

embedded by WP Embedded Video

And the direct link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPlYTx8wb2I

By way of background, in August of this year there was heavy rainfall in the mountains of eastern Kampong Thom and adjacent Preah Vihear Provinces. This flowed downhill and out onto the floodplain, flooding many of the rice fields around the village where I work. Such flooding is a normal part of annual ecosystem processes– flood waters from the uplands flow downhill while floodwaters from the Tonle Sap rise. They usually meet and mix on the floodplains south of the village. This flood pulse is a major factor in driving such a productive system. Land use systems in the village depend upon it. However in this case, the floods arrived about a month early. The water rose very quickly, over just a few days. As a result, rice plants were not yet tall enough to survive the flooding. Even other floodplain grasses such as Oryza rufipogon, important as sources of fodder for livestock, were affected. That first pulse has since receded, and was followed by another pulse of floodwater. Though this second pulse of flooding was on-time, the damage had already been done.

Farmers were, and still are, in a difficult position. Next year is likely to be a difficult one. In response to this flooding, I have seen a few strategies which they are using to mitigate loss. Some farmers have borrowed unflooded, uncultivated land from extended family members and planted another crop. Some are preparing to plant dry season rice in a few months. Others lack seed or resources to buy/borrow seed for another crop, and are waiting for the floods to recede to see how bad their situation is. Signs of coming foreign aid are starting to appear, though I do not yet know how much, who will receive it or who is sending it . A few farmers are using the technique of flood recession rice production. In this technique, as floodwaters recede, the newly revealed land is planted to a rapidly maturing rice variety. The farmer in this video had transplanted his fields 3 days before the early floods. Little of the crop survived, though the few individual plants which did survive were transplanted elsewhere (another crop recovery technique!). As the water drained, he traded seed with another farmer for a more rapidly maturing variety (maturing in about 70 days, as opposed to the 90 or so of the previous variety) and re-established a nursery. Since this video was made, we planted out the seedlings at 3 different sites. He and is family also have rice fields further out on the floodplain which remain flooded even today, and have not recovered. Though this technique may help to buffer his family in the coming year.

The steps illustrated in the video are: plowing, harrowing, baling water from the field with a snaich (water shovel), final seedbed preparation by hand and lastly, sowing of the rice seed. They are pretty typical of the farming techniques which I have seen used by other farmers in the area. What is novel about them is their timing with respect to the flooding and other ecological and agricultural processes. His brief commentary at the end of the clip describes these steps (I ask those more fluent in Khmer than I to forgive any mistakes in my translation)…

Farmer: Today I started by building a snaich (water shovel), an old-style snaich. When I finished with the snaich, I plowed and I harrowed [the field] in order to sow flood recession rice. This flood recession rice, I traded with someone [for the seed], the name [of the variety] is Srauv Chhlong Ndaing. So today, I started a crop of flood recession rice.

Me: Yes, and why did you change rice varieties?

Farmer: The reason that I changed rice varieties…last month I had already sown [a rice crop] and it had grown tall, I had pulled the seedlings from the seedbed and transplanted them already, then when the river water arrived everything was flooded. The variety that was flooded was called Srauv Romdoul. All of my property has been flooded.

This is the first video which I have ever put together. I am hopeful to include a few more, and am especially keen to teach some farmers how to use the camera. I think that their movies would be more interesting than mine!

Lastly, massive thanks to Beth Kanter and Jinja for technical support and encouragement in this new video stuff!

The village has gone about 2 weeks without rain. This being the rainy season, this is a little unusual. However, it is not that unusual. One of the quirks of the rainy season on the floodplain is that sometimes there are dry spells. For me, as an academic, this is just another reason why farming systems on the floodplain are so fascinating– another occasional surprise which must be dealt with. For the farmers who depend on their rice harvests for their daily caloric intake, it is a much more serious concern. As of yesterday, the lack of rain was a point of discussion. Something which was starting to worry people, but no one I have spoken with was in a panic yet. There have been plenty of promising, black, rumbling clouds like the ones above. But these seem to keep dropping their payload elsewhere.

The rice crops most affected seem to be those most recently sown– the quick maturing rice varieties. These are popular. They mature in about 3 months, and are usually directly sown around this time of year. With the right nutrient management, attention to pests, and a little luck, yields can be higher than with other rice cropping systems used in this area. But the crop needs water. When farmers have the money, and a field located close to a canal or large pond, they may irrigate. However around this village, this is not very common. Thus many of these sites are dependent upon rainfall. So, dry spells early in the season can be very hard on the young plants.

The dry spell left a couple of obvious marks on the landscape. The most obvious is the yellowing, browning and ultimate loss of the newly planted rice. This is evident in the above images. The most recently sown seeds simply fail to germinate and are eaten by birds and rats. The second obvious mark is an increase in weeds, seen in the second image above. As the rice struggles, weeds which are better able to cope with low water levels begin to out-compete the rice plants. I am not yet sure how farmers are going to respond to this, assuming the rain begins again soon. One farmer reported that if they have the time and money, they will re-plow and re-sow the lost fields once there is a good, heavy rain. He did not mention anything about the people who do not have the money.

On the social side, the dry spell has led to a change in daily farming activities. This time of year is the plowing season, among other things. People began to plow the most distant sites several weeks ago. As the season progressed, sites closer and closer to the village are plowed and leveled. The dry spell has slowed this progression. Right now, the soil in many places is too dry and hard to plow. Moreover, many people are waiting to sow the fields which have been recently plowed, as the seed will simply be lost.

Though not everyone is waiting. Yesterday, I took the picture above of a newly sown field. Was it sown in anticipation of rain from one of the aforementioned promising clouds? Does the farmer know something about the soil at that site which I do not? Were they simply impatient? Desperate? I cannot hazard a guess, since I did not meet the landowner to talk to them about their rationale.

Some sites have not been as severely affected. Rice planted in and around poorly-drained depressions is able to take advantage of water remaining in the soil. The image below was taken steps away from the site of the second image, above. The rice in that depression is in much better shape than the rice planted on higher sites (the pattern of soil visible in that field is due to the planting pattern, rather than the lack of rain).

Use of sites like this is a good example of farmers’ appreciation for diversity in the landscape. At first glance, the floodplain seems pancake-flat. However, there are many scattered hills and seasonal ponds– some small, quite large. These create a multitude of microsites– banks, islands, gullies– which farmers can take advantage of. Plantings in and around these wet sites are doing a little better right now than rice on better-drained sites.

There are certainly more tools that people use to navigate the caprice of the weather. Deepwater rice varieties were planted in some ponds and swampy areas around the village months ago. These plants are larger and more mature, so they are not as sensitive to fluctuations in water supply. They also are planted in areas which stay wetter longer, further insulating them. Therefore, the deepwater rice fields have not yet been heavily hit by the lack of rain. I suspect that some of the other rice varieties used by farmers are more drought-tolerant than others. I still need to keep looking around and asking questions.

As I write, it has started raining here in town. This does not mean that any will fall in the village. But I hope that it does.

It seems to be roof repair season in the village.

Over the last week, I noticed that many households in the village were cutting down sugar palm (Borassus flabellifer L., ដើមត្នោត) leaves for the preparation of roofing shingles (ស្លិកកន្ដប). This is not a simple process. First, leaves are cut down. Older leaves are taken, leaving a tuft of newer leaves on the top of the tree for continued growth. I find the cutting to be a daunting task, as the trees grow up to 30m tall. No one else here seems to have a problem with that, as the trees are regularly clumb for palm sap collection. The trees themselves are quite common in the Cambodian farm-scape, and are often found along field and property borders.

Cut leaves are then left for about a day to dry, or until labor can be mustered for the next step. Then, the laminae of the leaves are liberated from the massive petioles (which are set aside for use in other projects, like fencing and cordage preparation– an example is in the background of the picture below, with petioles used to construct a duck coop). The next step is splitting the palmate leaves into individual fingers, each with an intact central vein. This adds structural strength to the individual blades. The intact leaves themselves are very large, so they are first split into managable portions (primal cuts). Then a machete or sharpened wooden wedge (in some cases, made from a piece of petiole) is used to split the fingers apart, nearly down to their base, leaving a fasicle of several leaflets. At this stage, small leaves or severely damaged leaves are culled.

The base of each fascicle is then trimmed off with a hatchet or machete. Once trimmed, individual blades are bundled, and left in a shady spot to cure further. These bundles are later opened, and individual blades flattened. Management of leaf moisture is very important throughout the process, as leaves which are either too dry or too wet are difficult to work, and may lead to a weaker shingle.

For the shingles themselves, leaves are folded in half over a bamboo splint (ពុះដើមឬស្សី) ​of about a meter long. They are added individually, so that each overlaps the next. The blades are then sewn to each other, using one row of stiching up near the bamboo splint. Finished shingles are then soaked in a pond for around 3 months– until they turn black. After soaking, they are dried, then washed and dried again. At this point, they may either be used for roof construction or stored in a shady spot until they are needed. As roofing material, they can last several years. Sewn, but unsoaked, shingles may be sold to itinerant merchants for about US$0.02. These are then sold in town. The child pictured here has since sold this batch and started another pile.

In Phnom Penh, I was lucky enough this year to be able to get in on the fun at the Royal Plowing Ceremony. I enjoy this particular ceremony. It is full of royal pomp, Brahmanist practice (harkening back to pre-Buddhist Khmerness) and of course, is focused on agriculture (plus, who can’t love fertility rituals?). In a nutshell (there’s much more to it than this): the King, or in this case his desigante (as the King himself is unmarried, and so cannot perform the ceremony), opens the planting season by plowing several furrows running around the field next to the royal palace. This year, the King’s designate was Prince Norodom Singharath, pictured above. Following this procession, one of the ox teams is offered a range of foods, in a row of golden bowls– sesame seeds, rice, beans, wine, grass, water and corn. Their behavior, what they choose and how much of it, is then interpreted by the royal Brahman priests in order to forcast the coming year (the Brahmans are on the left wearing white in the image below). This year, neither animal was particularly hungry. One ate 45% of the bowel of corn. The other refused to eat altogether. As I understand it, this suggests that corn yields will be fair. However, rice producers should be worred, as the team avoided eating any rice at all, which predicts a poor rice harvest. Likewise, neither drank any water. This predicts a dry year. So, the outlook is pretty negative, since the majority of Cambodia’s agriculture is based on rice. And much of that depends upon the rain.

Another thing that I find interesting about the Royal Plowing Cermony is that I keep getting my pocket picked there. In 2005, a girl tried to sneak my camera out of my pocket, but I interrupted her mid-sneak. This time, my ziploc bag of toilet paper was removed from my back pocket, despite it being securely buttoned in. I caught on quickly after it was gone, and recovered it from the ground next to me (beneath the feet of the guy who I think stole, then discarded, it). Then, not 10 minutes later, someone else tried the same thing. This time I was onto him before he got my pocket open. Interestingly, I had to nearly turn my entire body around to face him before he let go of my pocket flap (reminding me of a friend of mine, who caught someone picking his pocket, grabbed him by the shirt with both hands, and while he was administering the pre-beating cuss words, the slickster stole the watch right off of his wrist and then wriggled free). I am not surprised to have been targeted in that situation (a foreigner in a crowd of people, all craning their necks to see what the oxen are doing = easy pickins), and am not all that bent out of shape about it. I’d probably be more annoyed if they had actually found something valuable.

I think that over the course of my life, I have been the target of pickpockets 5 times– twice at bus stands in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and three times here at the Royal Plowing ceremony (almost 10 years living in New York City, and nothing has happened there, yet). I try to plan for such events, and I have been lucky. So no one has ever gotten anything more valuable than my stash of toilet paper (which they always seem to discard immediately, for some reason). And, I sort of appreciate the chance to analyze their tactics.

In retrospect, it is always pretty clear how they did it– what distractions they used, whether they were working in a group of not, and stuff like that. Sometimes it is pretty ingenious (in a slight of hand sense), like the one guy that was part of the chaos of a pre-dawn bus loading who pointed up at the top of the bus with one hand, yelling to his friends (seemingly involved in lashing down cargo), while at the same time discretely reaching with his other hand beneath his pointing arm (his hand concealed by his armpit) to get into my breast pocket as we passed each other shoulder to shoulder. I, of course, was distracted– looking up to see what he was yelling about. Others are not that ingenious, like the first guy today. He took advantage of people moving from the front of the crowd to the rear, to push me forward. I just thought he was a big jerk trying to get closer to the front. And that is what I was supposed to think, as all his pushing on my upper back distracted me from my behind, which was signalling an intrusion attempt which ultimately went unheeded.

I was not the only one targeted at the event. One young woman was taken away by the police when a middle-aged Khmer man caught her stealing his cell phone. He seemed more amused about it than anything, though she certainly was not. I believe that she was part of the team who made the second attempt on my toilet paper. So I must confess to having some satisfaction in her capture. However, I have never confronted anyone or called in the police when this sort of thing happens. I am never 100% confindent in my assessment of exactly who did it. The sneaky nature of the crime, and the anonymity of the crowd, makes it difficult to be certain enough to get all serious about things. Things certainly could have been worse– some of the government employees I know who came in from the countryside to work at the event that had their hotel rooms broken into. They lost money, cell phones, keys. That really stinks. One vowed never to return to the city again. I can’t say I blame him for feeling that way. But I’ll still probably turn out for the Royal Plowing Ceremony next time I am in town for it. Maybe I’ll even jump on the chance to gather more data, and put toilet paper in both my back pockets.

Above: packing up after the ceremony, the mobile traditional percussion unit is returned to the palace.

Thanks to Phil at Phnomenon for his tip about the Geo Mashup Plugin, I have finally started georeferencing my posts. I will try and stay up on new ones, and will be progressively adding spatial information to the older posts. As I do this, I will be tagging them as part of the category, “Map.” So, if you select that out of the category cloud, you should be able to see all of the posts for which I have added spatial information.

So, to see a map of Cambodia with a little pin marking the spot where a picture was taken or observation made, just click on the “Where am I?” link at the upper right of the page. The maps use Google’s satellite data– so zoom right in and have a look (note: some posts are in tight clusters, so coarse spatial resolution conceals just how many points there might be!). The finest resolution is okay for many rural areas, though they provide some very-fine grained resolution for areas around Angkor Wat and Phnom Penh, which is pretty cool.

I am still tweaking some of the display settings, so please forgive the legibility problems you will inevitably encounter if you click on the pins to see the link to the related post. Hopefully they will be ironed out soon.

Yesterday, I took a little ride up the main road to Siem Reap to see what I could see. We have had a couple of major rainstorms, which should have started to soften the soil enough for farmers to start plowing the fields which they will be planting to rain-fed rice. About 17km or so north of town, there is a large lake which spans both sides of the road. There is not a lot right around the lake, along the road there is a little place to buy snacks and lounge in a hammock lakeside.

However, I was interested in the farm across the road from the snack dealers.

They have a diverse little homegarden set up: coconuts, toddy palms, bananas, bamboo, cassava, and a bunch of other trees which I did not recognize. However, they also had a small irrigated plot of mung beans which you can see over on the far right of the image (it is tough to see, but look for the tree branches used for trellises).

Also grazing freely in this area along the lakeshore, near the farm, was a small herd of cows. I do not know who the owners were. I often see cows wandering freely, though herds grazing far from home will be tended by young boys. In this case, I think that they might have benefited from allocating someone to watch the cows. Clearly the forage around the lake is not in very good condition. However, mung beans are rich in nitrogen and likey pretty tasty (with forages, there is an inverse relationship between carbon and nitrogen content, which is mirrored in palatability– woody stuff does not taste as good, and has less protein). The cows are onto this.

There is a light fence protecting the bean plot, though I think that it was just constructed of bamboo and debris, and am certain that it was not particularly robust.

Breach it and they will come…

From another angle, you can see the end result. I did not stick around to see if the others joined their fellows in the bean plot. Note also the irrigation pump.

The farmers were no where to be seen. But I feel for them. Having hurled both stones and curses at cows and lazy herdboys in my maize/pigeon pea intercropping demonstration plots back in Tanzania, I can sympathize (believe me, more civil attempts at negotiation were totally ineffective). I am a strong advocate of live fencing, nice, dense thorny stuff. I have seen people use Pandanus to that effect here, but I do not yet know how well it would do when the floods are up. However, I think that there is a common farmstead rattan which would work on flooding areas. Though I have seen that managed more as clumps or thick hedgerows. I expect that I will have a better grip on the fencing situation, once I am out talking to farmers more often.

Fences and hedgerows are not just for keeping things in or out. They are pretty important ecologically too, potentially representing a substantial fraction of a landscape’s agrodiversity and contributing significantly to landscape heterogeneity. They are places to grow or manage useful plants (be they for medicines, food, fodder, mulch, firewood and more). Moreover, they can be crucial habitat for anything from beneficial predatory insects (as in, the kind that eats agricultural pests) to birds, herps and more.

Mind you, these are just my musings on fencing. I am not here to tell anyone what to do. My goal is a better understanding of what they are doing, how it is changing and why.