Traditional agriculture in Indonesia; what I learned.
So I just returned a few days ago from Indonesia, mostly I went to visit my girlfriend, who is Indonesian and is staying there for a while. We both have a very keen interest in
gardening and food so we spent most of our time traveling the country and immersed in that. We visited terraced rice farms which have been in continuous use for hundreds, or in some places even thousands of years. We saw terraced vegetable farms and orchards, tea plantations, small scale urban livestock and much more. The common
thread: unlike most/all of farming I have seen in the U.S. most/all of what we saw there incorporated "permaculture". In this case I do feel strange using the word, I brought the word
permaculture up in conversation with one farmer and he was slightly confused, he said "Oh, we just call it
gardening, it isn't special". Basically its just the way everyone does things there, it feels vaguely imperialistic to come in and rename the way they have been growing their food for thousands of years. They weren't always using
permaculture in its full on, "textbook" incarnation but there was a very high amount of polyculturing, integration with livestock and forming the earth to conserve/capture resources, lets just toss it under our big umbrella.
Anyways, these people have been successfully growing food for thousands of years on the same
land. And not just that but it would appear to be at a greater yield per acre than what we produce in the "civilized" and "industrial" west. Millions of people in their huge cities eat food grown in this way, usually with little/no pesticides or artificial fertilizer. Not because they are prejudiced against it or think they are unhealthy, mostly because they are too expensive and they have already found better ways to perform all the functions of chemically intensive agriculture.
So I'll start with one of the most striking things I saw on the whole trip. We had just gone out to explore some valleys in the mountains, it had just poured rain the previous night and was still at a heavy drizzle and we came across a stream. Keep in mind the hillsides above this are almost 100% devoted to agriculture: rice paddies and terraced vegetable plots, from where we were to many miles further up river. But even with this kind of land use, the
water was perfectly, almost drinkably clear after a rainstorm.
If you visit any intensively farmed land in the U.S. in hilly country, and there is a rainstorm, the river is going to be mud brown. Largely because farmers here don't bother terracing their land or putting down cover crops, it's almost always bare soil. A very inviting atmosphere for little raindrops to walk off with what
should be viewed as the most precious resource; FERTILE SOIL.
Lesson: It is easier to dig terraces by hand than it is to have to create new soil when the old washes away. They wouldn't bother with the laborious task of making them in the first place if this weren't true.
Rice:
I'm going to include as much in-depth information about rice cultivation as I can. I have never found a good resource on growing it so I will try include
enough info for someone to design rice paddies and carry a crop through to harvest. If someone has any specific questions I neglect to
answer, just send me a PM. Plus... It would be impossible to write this article without talking about rice, rice forms the backbone... or maybe even the entire skeleton for the cuisine there. A typical day could have you eating rice with all 3 meals, plus rice pudding for dessert.
Rice is always grown in paddies, just manmade depressions, usually with some artificial method to drain and fill them with water.
Sometimes they are built on mostly flat land with just enough elevation change between paddies to shunt water around where you want it, like these:
And sometimes they are built on what would be considered "
useless" land for farming in the west. They managed to get a heavy yield from this
useless land:
Just to give an idea of the grade here:
These paddies will produce about ~3 crops a year. On occasion the floodgates are opened up and they allowed to fully dry and are used as grazing terraces for cows and
chickens. Sometimes the paddies and holding ponds are used for raising goldfish and tilapia to eat, this not only keeps the insect population down but fertilizes the water also. There didn't seem to be many real inputs, they toss in their extra cow manure and chop some of the rice
straw to use as mulch, they said that was basically all they needed to keep them fertile.
Also some made use of the water once it reached the end, some didn't. Usually it was used to water a few clumps of bananas or for irrigating vegetables.
I also inquired as to whether they planted the rice from seed right in the paddy or whether they transplanted it as I have heard of some doing. Everyone had the same answer, it is started from seed right in place. One farmer said the transplanting is something they do in climates with hard freezes in winter, another said they do that in monsoon climates, didn't get much more of an explanation.
As far as the other infrastructure, sometimes the extra irrigation water comes from
wells, some were electrically pumped, some wind. Sometimes water was diverted from a river by way of canals, and other times there was a large
pond at the top of a hill that collected rainwater and gravity was used to
feed paddies on lower slopes. Usually these ponds were used for
aquaculture or ducks also. The water is diverted to the paddies either by
underground pipes or shallow canals, the canals were lined with
concrete in the really deluxe operations, otherwise just packed clay or grass. Also in the rainy season here I was told that there is minimal need for irrigation, the rain provides all the water they need, the extra irrigation is mostly used in the dry season and in droughts. The water level is controlled by managing the height of the drain, usually this was a pretty simple setup, a piece of plywood or woven bamboo covering the drain canal then backup up with clay so as to leak less, they still all leak a little bit. Shown here:
I think thats about it for infrastructure.
As far as actually growing the rice. First the field is tilled, some people did this by hand, some used the only piece of machinery I saw anyone using for rice the whole time I was there (Yeah, no tractors, the land is too steep anyways). A walk-behind gas powered plow, what decadence!
Usually these were shared by a few dozen people so as to not be wasteful. Most of the labor I saw was done just with hand tools though. Here is one of the laborers we interviewed (left, blue shirt, or is it gold???) along with my girlfriend (right, pink shirt):
We managed to get such a huge wealth of knowledge by interviewing farmers in Indonesian, as my girlfriend speaks it natively. Most of them knew little to no English, and their daily wage is only about 5USD so paying them the equivalent of 2-3 dollars was enough to get most of them to spill their entire life story for us, plus all of their ancestral rice farming knowledge.
As far as planting the rice, they rinse it with water many times over the course of a few days until it sprouts a little bit, then it is planted in its final location. As far as spacing and planting depth I wish I could be more help although I didn't get to see it done in person, planting is only done 3 times a year so...
As far as care over the life of the plant, it seems to be mostly weeding, as is the case with any other garden. Some of this is done by hand with a hoe in the case of aquatic weeds. Non-aquatic weeds are usually kept at bay by virtue of being a few inches underwater.
A full crop takes roughly 3 months to fully ripen. When it is near time for harvest the rice grains will turn medium gold and the insides will solidify, they get less milky and soft. A week or so before harvest the paddy is drained completely, both to lower the moisture level of the plant and so they don't have to trudge through knee deep mud to harvest. The rice is then stripped off the plant, usually just by whacking the stalk on the ground or over a box. Then dried on mats in the sun for storage.
Just a few misc things about them integrating it with livestock. Sometimes birds eat the crop, sometimes bugs do, sometimes weeds do, they have some solutions for them all. Ill try to keep it simple.
Solution for bugs:
There didn't seem to be any management of their free range flocks. Just random
chickens all over.
Solution for birds:
There are tons of these scrappy looking dogs running around. I was told they deter birds.
Not sure how well this works, but it cant hurt hahah.
Solution for weeds:
Ducks...
Plus just pulling them by hand.
And as far as integration with other plants, besides using the extra water from the paddies to irrigate other things none of it looked planned. There were tons of food
trees all over, papaya, banana, coconut palms, salak palms, avocado etc... but they were just all in like random configuration, it looked 100% wild. I didn't ask as much about the nearby trees as I should have in retrospect.
I wish I had more info to share about the actual growing process but most of the farmers I think took for granted how complex the process must look if you haven't been doing it since birth and left out many small details. Also I am aware of my prevalent use of the word "sometimes", that is because the growing techniques used aren't cookie cutter.Every farm we visited was slightly different, and they all basically said what you are doing depends on everything: the weather, pests, season, location of your farm etc...
Ok, I guess this is it for the section on rice, since it took 3 hours to compose I will write the sections about tea and vegetables later. I honestly could have written 3x as much just about rice even so if you have a specific question just PM me. I also will be going back to Indonesia in October so I will have an opportunity to learn even more, its so valuable to go there with someone who can easily translate.
Thanks for reading part 1.
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