After reaching Lobeysa, we gave ourselves time to do nothing. After breakfast we decided to solve the mystery of the missing men, something that had puzzled us in Ura as well as Tang. The Sullen Celt wanted to walk to the fields that we saw across a small river. After surveying the distance, we voted to take the car part of the way.
The whole village was at work in the fields. Nine years back, the economy of Bhutan was clicking up. Hydroelectric power export and tourism were becoming a larger fraction of the economy, but most of the population was still involved in farming. Around a third of the economy came directly from agriculture.
Almost all the working women worked in agriculture, as did almost two thirds of the working men. Lobeysa has water for irrigation, which instantly resulted in rice being the main crop.
Human culture is so centred on agriculture that it is hard to think of it as technology. But this was not how the original humans evolved. The little tribes of humans who walked across continents and land bridges exposed by the frozen seas of the last ice age were not farmers. They were hunters and foragers. Farming was invented in diverse parts of Asia during the explosion of plant life that followed the retreat of the ice. Converting virgin forest into farmland, shaping the landscape by tilling, diverting water for irrigation, planting, transplanting and harvesting rice are technologies as old as the settling of Asia.
Farming is backbreaking labour, whether it is carrying the rice paddies in a basket from one field to another (photo, above left), transplanting them in a flooded field (featured image), or tilling the field (above). When I look at this work now, I see in it an effort to recreate the soil conditions of the receding ice age in which Oryza sativa, rice, developed.
One major difference between this part of Bhutan and the Bumthang district is in the crops they cultivate. Bumthang has less irrigation, so the major crops there are millets like buckwheat and barley, or potatoes. On the other hand, the Butanese seem to love rice, so the better off one is, the more rice one eats. Economics is the same in all countries!
Don't hold your breath 
In South China the fields were (then) an enormous part of the landscape. But the other crops they grew were more interesting to me. I watched all the time — easy because I lived right beside the agricultural university. My close neighbor was a beautiful water buffalo. Only when I visited Hainan Island did I get a chance to walk in the rice fields, on the little levees that separate one field from another. They had just planted and only tiny tips of newly planted rice showed above the water. There was a serenity to the fields that concealed the incredible labor that had planted them.
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That’s exactly it, the soothing green makes you forget how unnatural and labor intensive farming is.
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I live in an agricultural community now. The main crop is potatoes, followed by hops, barley and safflower. There’s a lot of machinery involved, but still when harvest comes, hands are needed.
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Indeed. Always
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Agriculture is really julienning the land, isn’t it. Nice one. We try to grow rice in Australia. But there is not enough water. Crazy.
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That’s right, rice is especially water hungry.
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