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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.