Farming

How many of us Singaporean urbanites done any farming? Or know about it for the matter? Well, a visit to a rural coastal countryside in Fujian province of China brought me some insight, as well as an aching back!

Even with the breakneck speed of modernisation of China, many parts of the huge country are still farming based. I had the opportunity to visit a town which does its farming beside its concrete buildings! And what did we plant? Nuts!

Yes, taking these raw groundnut kernels, it's just a matter of planting them into the tilled land. Oh, but what back breaking process! All I did was a morning and I'm done for! But hey, I've tried!

What is amazing is, not only do they do their farming on land, they do it at sea too! Yes! They even do farming on the sea bed!

One of the feature of the coast here is that once the tide recede, the seabed extends out several kilometres! So the locals start carving out plots of "land" on the seabed and farm a sort of mussels/clams unique to this area.
So, into these "plots of land", they "plant" baby mussels. Once the tide comes back in, they will immersed into the sea to grow. Once the tide falls back out to sea again, the seabed is exposed again, and the farmers will go out and "agitate" the land, which will not allow the mussels to get buried too deep into the ground. Neat huh! And they are delicious!!

They have been doing this since ages past. I wonder how long they can still do this.....