Southeast Asia: Paddy Biology and the Water Buffalo
Southeast Asia: Paddy Biology and the Water Buffalo A flooded rice paddy looks, to an untrained eye, like a pond with rice growing in it. What it...
A flooded rice paddy looks, to an untrained eye, like a pond with rice growing in it.
What it actually is: one of the most productive and biologically complex agricultural systems ever developed. The flooding is not incidental to the growing of rice. The flooding is the system. The water creates conditions that no dryland farming can replicate — and the soil that builds under decades of repeated flooding becomes something unlike any other agricultural soil in the world.
What Flooding Does to Soil
When a paddy field is flooded, the soil beneath the water shifts into an anaerobic state — an environment without oxygen.
In aerobic soil, organic matter decomposes rapidly, releasing nutrients quickly but also losing them quickly to the air and to runoff. In anaerobic soil, decomposition slows dramatically. Organic matter accumulates. Nutrients that would be lost in a dryland system are held in the...
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Southeast Asia: Rice, Village Seed Networks, and the Wet Season
North America: Cherokee, Haudenosaunee, and the Three Sisters
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