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Modern Business Geography 
in wet lands. The peasants then 
churn the soil into a creamy paste 
with their bare feet or with hoes, 
until the fields look like giant mud 
pies ready for baking. 
Rice plants about eight inches tall 
are now brought from nursery beds 
in bundles of a hundred or so. A 
gang of women start from one side 
of the field and carefully push each 
plant into the mud, about ten inches 
from its neighbors. These women 
have transplanted rice ever since 
they were young girls, and they do 
it speedily and skillfully. Now the 
water is admitted to the fields and 
kept two to three inches deep for three 
to four months, or until the harvest 
time approaches. In the meantime 
the field is occasionally weeded. 
The sight of hundreds of recently 
planted rice fields is one long to be 
remembered. The delicate green of the young plants suggests a rug of 
softest velvet. Equally interesting is the harvest scene, when women 
reap the rice with little hand sickles, while men with bullocks thresh 
and winnow it by the primitive methods described above for wheat. 
MILLET 
While few people in the United States know much about millet, 
to the world at large it is almost as important as wheat. Its name 
comes from the Latin word mille, meaning a thousand. One seed 
may produce a plant yielding a thousand seeds. 
Why millet is an important cereal. The number of people in 
India and China who depend almost entirely upon millet as their food 
is much greater than the whole population of the western hemisphere. 
In the Orient it is the daily food of the poor man’s family and is 
eaten like corn, both in the form of bread and as porridge. 
In the United States some millet is raised ; but the crop is mainly 
cut for cattle feed before it ripens. The millet used for caged birds 
or for poultry is imported largely from Germany and Italy.