These people have, therefore, given effective attention to the matter of drainage as well as irrigation and are looking after possible losses of plant food, as well as ways of supplying it.  It is not alone where rice is grown that cultural methods are made to conserve soluble plant food and to reduce its loss from the field, for very often, where flooding is not practiced, small fields and beds, made quite level, are surrounded by low raised borders which permit not only the whole of any rain to be retained upon the field when so desired, but it is completely distributed over it, thus causing the whole soil to be uniformly charged with moisture and preventing washing from one portion of the field to another.  Such provisions are shown in Figs. 133 and 138.

Extensive as is the acreage of irrigated rice in China, Korea and Japan, nearly every spear is transplanted; the largest and best crop possible, rather than the least labor and trouble, as is so often the case with us, determining their methods and practices.  We first saw the fitting of the rice nursery beds at Canton and again near Kashing in Chekiang province on the farm of Mrs. Wu, whose homestead is seen in Fig. 156.  She had come with her husband from Ningpo after the ravages of the Taiping rebellion had swept from two provinces alone twenty millions of people and settled on a small area of then vacated land.  As they prospered they added to their holding by purchase until about twenty-five acres were acquired, an area about ten times that possessed by the usual prosperous family in China.  The widow was managing her place, one of her sons, although married, being still in school, the daughter-in-law living with her mother-in-law and helping in the home.  Her field help during the summer consisted of seven laborers and she kept four cows for the plowing and pumping of water for irrigation.  The wages of the men were at the rate of $24, Mexican, for five summer months, together with their meals which were four each day.  The cash outlay for the seven men was thus $14.45 of our currency per month.  Ten years before, such labor had been $30 per year, as compared with $50 at the time of our visit, or $12.90 and $21.50 of our currency, respectively.

Her usual yields of rice were two piculs per mow, or twenty-six and two-thirds bushels per acre, and a wheat crop yielding half this amount, or some other, was taken from part of the land the same season, one fertilization answering for the two crops.  She stated that her annual expense for fertilizers purchased was usually about $60, or $25.80 of our currency.  The homestead of Mrs. Wu, Fig. 156, consists of a compound in the form of a large quadrangle surrounding a court closed on the south by a solid wall eight feet high.  The structure is of earth brick with the roof thatched with rice straw.