Hi Steemit

• Today I took some rice gotten from my farm to prepare a meal for the family and it occur to me that I can take my fellow Steemit on a tour to where and how I get this rice .

• We are still in the 4th month of the year ( April ) and the rains have not fully started , this is very unusual and the swamp field for growing my rice is still very much dried
  The soil is usually loamy-clay with high water retention capacity , fine sand with a high percentage of humus .

Here are plant debris from last year rice .

• Usually during the dry seasons Fulani herdmans move around the farm with their cows who feed on the plant debris from the farming season and in the process they pass their waste products (Cow dung's) on the fields a very good source of fertilizer for next year planting.

Cow dung's in the field , this dissolves into the soil with rain , but we also use additional fertilizer like NPK

• Here we can see green life coming up as a result of little water from infrequent rain , rice grains from last year has sprout but this are not used and are destroyed during tilling because they germinated too early and the their life cycle will not fit well with the weather for them to yield proper harvest .

• In growing my rice I have classified the process into 5 different stages

1 Bed making and growing of seedlings in bed

2 Clearing and tilling of the field

3 Transplanting

4 Weeding and application of fertilizer

5 Harvest and storage of rice

These are all elaborate process and activities you can look forward to as I would be bringing in to us when the processes begin .

• I store rice harvested from my farm in bags as you can see , and from there there is still another work of parboiling and milling to be done before I can finally cook rice for family meals .

• With Modern equipment like tractors and sprayers , including pumping machines to get water into rice swamp when it is dry due to low rain , these works are usually easier and with higher yields, improved and better seeds from modern biotechnology are available as well , but I still practice crude farming methods as these are the ones affordable to me for now.
• I love farming and wished that someday I will get an opportunity to farm and feed the world with better tools and larger fields , I want to be in control of planting and harvesting anywhere in the world .

I hope you enjoyed this post of an overview of growing rice.

Now that you have an idea , you can try it out for fun and watch how green life becomes food for man

Thanks for staying tuned to my every post .