Koreans and Organic Rice

I spent the past couple days on organic rice fields. I actually did not know the fields I was going to were organic until I was there. I also did not know that most of the employees on the fields were Korean. I knew I was going to go with a group of people visiting from Korea, but the organic rice and the Korean workers (both unexpected) might have been a coincidence. I think , however, there is something to say about why we went to see them together.

Wuchang is a town just an hour and a half south of Harbin. All people tell me the highest quality northeast rice comes from here. I visited on my own about a month and a half ago, but did not make it a formal visit. This time, I was happy to go with people who were going with their own mission. Two of people were South Koreans from a televisions station, making a program about Chinese rice, so they wanted to learn about rice and get footage for their program. There was another South Korean rice researcher, my professor (ethnically Korean, but a Chinese citizen) and a Chinese driver. Six of us that drove from Harbin to Wuchang and spent two days visiting farms, fields, government offices, research institutes, and mills. None of us spoke one common language, so car rides and meetings were filled with Korean, Chinese, and a little English going back and forth. Korean is a very beautiful language to listen to; I wish I could speak it.

Its the end of harvest season. Paddy fields were drained of water beginning in early September. As a result, the rice still in the ground was brown and drying. When we got to the fields, workers were chopping them down to let the stalks lay out for about ten days. This helps make it easy to remove the grain from the plant. The workers were skilled and had the act perfected to a rhythm. I wish my pictures could capture that rhythm better.

The workers on these fields get paid 6 times what workers on 'average' rice farms get. The production of japonica rice in the northeast really got underway at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of the skilled laborers then, and in the following century, were ethnic Koreans living in China. Today, the northeast of China is host to over 2 million Koreans. Koreans are one of the most well-off minorities living in China.

The Koreans who came on the trip with us told me that organic rice is still very small in Korea, as it is in China. Why, of all the rice fields that we visited, then did we go to organic fields? Probably because they are exemplary of the best fields and practices to grow rice here. Last summer, I was taken to organic soybean fields in Jilin (the province just south of Heilongjiang) when a Dutch researcher was visiting. Again, I tagged along with a professor as she led a Dutch researcher to the organic fields.

When I first wanted to study food and agriculture in China, I wanted to study the developing organic industry here. I had problems with that idea because, to the average Chinese, organic is not an important influential factor (but 'quality' is). I felt it would be more of an international industry than a local food movement. It is. And when foreign researchers request to be taken to the Chinese countryside, we are led to the best fields to show the best agriculture China is capable of. For the Koreans who visited, it worked out well that they could communicate with the workers in Korean and they got to see the best rice fields in the northeast.
Workers in the fields. You can see the grains up close here.Ready to be milled...This machine is separating the poor quality grains (usually broken or not fully formed) from the rice ready to go to the market.
The final product. The top left green circle claims this is organic rice (its hard to read).