A sharp look-out must be kept for insects of various sorts.  In more than one place I saw the boys and girls of elementary schools wading in the paddies and stroking the young rice with switches in order to make noxious insects rise.  The creatures were captured by the young enthusiasts with nets.  The children were given special times off from school work in which to hunt the rice pests and were encouraged to bring specimens to school.

There is no greater delight to the eye than the paddies in their early green, rippled and gently laid over by the wind. (One should say greens, for there is every tint from the rather woe-begone yellowish green of the newly planted out rice to the happy luxuriant dark green of the paddies that have long been enjoying the best of quarters.) As harvest time approaches,[78] the paddies, because they are not all planted with the same variety of rice, are in patches of different shades.  Some are straw colour, some are reddish brown or almost black.  A poet speaks of the “hanging ears of rice.”  Rice always seems to hang its head more than other crops.  It is weaker in the straw than barley, but rice frequently droops not only because of its natural habit, but because it has been over-manured or wrongly manured or because of wind or wet.

Beyond wind,[79] insects and drought, floods are the enemies of rice.  When the plants are young, three or four days’ flooding do not matter much, but in August, when the ears are shooting, it is a different matter.  The sun pours down and soon rots the rice lying in the warm water.  Sometimes the farmer, by almost withdrawing the water from his paddies, raises the temperature of the soil with benefit to the crop.

The farmer is fortunate who is able to get the water completely out of his paddies by the time harvest arrives, but, as we have seen, two-thirds of the paddies must be harvested in sludge.  Many crops are muddied before they can be cut.  Sometimes on the eve of harvest the farmer wades in and tries, by arranging the fallen stems across one another, to keep some of the ears out of the water.  But he is not very successful.  Rice may lie in the wet a week or even the best end of a fortnight without serious damage.  But all that this means is that within the period specified it may not sprout.  It must be damaged to some extent even by a few days’ immersion.  The reason why it is not damaged more than it is is no doubt, first, because rice is a plant which has been brought up to take its chances with water, and in the second place because the thing which is known to the housewife as rice is not really the grain at all but the interior of the grain.