Atlas Obscura has an article about the history of the rice paddy art in the village of Inakadate: The farmers were aging, the young folks were leaving for better paying and easier jobs in the city, and then someone had an idea.
LINK for the entire story: how it started, and how it is designed then planted by hand to make the design.
and the city has a webcam:
and a short film about the project:
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we are in a rice growing area, and have the same problem with older folks retiring.
Most of the farmers we subcontract with to grow our organic rice brand are local people who are aging. Thanks to land reform, their kids are educated and work elsewhere. Many want to sell their fields, but the law limits how much land you can own, so we had bought back some of the land that was given to them (yes, I know: sold to them cheap) many years ago with land reform, but we can't buy any more fields due to the law.
But other Balikbayan (returning overseas workers) are buying up the land, including some from Manila who merely want to build a vacation home in a rural area, meaning the good rice fields are being urbanized.
For the land we still own, we hire tenant farmers who care for our land are from Joy's village in the Visayas, but I suspect the answer to the labor shortage in the future is increased mechanization of rice growing, as is being done in Japan and other more affluent countries.
Rice is planted in two ways: broad cast of seeds (for winter harvest, which here depends on irrigation or an iffy rain) or preparing the fields and flooding them, then planting rice seedlings in the mud.
We usually buy the seedlings from the local rice institute, and plant by hand, although in the future it will be done using machinery (I had to laugh at the Clarkson Farm part where he uses an expensive machine to plant his veggie seedling: but this is the way of the future for planting rice seedlings, although probably using a smaller machine the size of a handplow.)
The dirty little secret is that our area grows rice and veggies, but the imported rice and veggies often crash the price, which is why the gov't is pushing organic rice and veggies: More expensive but better quality, but alas more labor intensive.
When I first visited here, much of the hard work of growing and harvesting rice was being done by hand, but over the last 30 years we have increased the use of machinery: handplows instead of waterbuffalo to till the fields and keep the weeds down, renting a harvester/thresher instead of cutting by hand and using our thresher to separate the seed before we sun dry it with our rice drier or on the local roads, etc. Presumably seedling planters are the next step.
But farming is still back breaking work, and not very profitable. And cheap imports from more mechanized countries keep the price down.
Will the covid problems with importing stuff make it better? Maybe. It would be nice if the Philippines was independent in food production, but we still have to use fertilizer, (huge price increase this year) and then the machinery, and the transportation of the harvest requires diesel/gasoline.
Here, the change in oil/LPG/gasoline prices make headlines.
and in case you are wondering about the poor retired waterbuffalo: well, they are being used to produce milk and dairy products.
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