Lao Voices

This post is for Laovoices and Nye Noona readers, I think harvest time is what we’re waiting to see.

Rice has been a huge part of my upbringing, even though we don’t eat a lot of sticky rice, mainly because my dad is part Chinese, but we do eat white rice as long as I could remember, and sticky rice on special occasions. Somehow, I have a feeling that they would harvest the rice paddy today; I could tell when I drove passed the rice paddy yesterday evening, so I brought my camera with me today. I walked down the hill during my lunch break, and to my surprised, it’s harvest time. This is such a pretty sight, when I got there, I must have had a big smile on my face, and I was greeted with this welcoming smile.

It’s hot and sunny today, must be closed to 95-F, but she looks very happy, obviously a very good year for them this year, and a plus that the price of rice is so high, and these new rice will definitely be a treat for the whole family.

As for cropping and farming systems in Laos, according to wikipedia, most farmers employ one of two cultivation systems: either the wet-field paddy system, practiced primarily in the plains and valleys, or the swidden cultivation system, practiced primarily in the hills. These systems are not mutually exclusive, especially among the Lao Loum or lowland Lao in areas remote from major river valleys. Swidden cultivation was practiced by approximately 1 million farmers in 1990, who grew mostly rice on about 40 percent of the total land area planted to rice.

As you can see that they’ve water running into the rice paddies, their cultivation system I believed is called the wet-field paddy.I noticed the water pipes at the very beginning, and not surprised to see this at all since this is indeed a rice paddy in America, and not in Laos.

I’m glad to see many critters out today, I could hear the bull frog making some serious noise, I believed they eat insects, and I’m sure their sound don’t attract the insect to come to them. I got some what good shots of the dragonflies, the damselflies, spider, and grasshoppers.