Rice or solar panels? Who is pushing this?

 Kuya is busy harvesting the rice, and last night, he lamented on the difficulty of making a profit this harvest.

He knows that our profit will be eaten up by increased expenses (high diesel prices to run the farm equipment and higher fertilizer prices, even though we mainly use organic, that price has soared too).

Awhile back Huawei wanted to put 5G antennas on our land, and he refused. But now we are short of money (the check paying for the last harvest bounced, and the buyer fled the country so we are out of six months of income. Welcome to the third world).

So now he is being told that growing rice is going to be discouraged because it produces greenhouse gases.

 I've discussed this in the past: When you flood the rice paddies, the weeds rot and produce methane, even with the newer dry method that irrigates a lot less produces less methane but produces more nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas.

BAD RICE! 

To complicate matters, thanks to land reform years ago, farmers now own their traditional plots. But their kids are moving to the cities, so don't want to farm, (which is why we subcontract and are using more machinery, whereas twenty years ago our farmers still harvested by hand Next step: machine planting. Not there yet, but maybe soon. And with more investment, we could get three crops a year instead of two.)

So if they discourage growing rice in the rice growing region of Luzon, what should we do?

TADA! Solar panels to replace rice on local fields.

(just ignore the toxic waste problems from using these panels).

In other words, instead of investing in more hydro electric plants, investing in geothermal energy (Like Iceland), or using local coal or using the natural gas in the west Philippine sea for electricity, the idea is to take rice land and put large solar panels out to get electricity for nearby Manila.

So anyway, Kuya is getting inquiries about selling some of our rice land to put solar panels on them instead of growing rice.

Well, this explains the thugs threatening our farmers and threatening our cook trying to find where we live, saying they want Kuya to sell our plots of land.

Sigh.

-----------

Update: Even Martha Stewart is warning you about the upcoming shortage of rice. LINK

it blames the weather, but bad weather is common: What is going on now is a perfecgt storm of bad weather, sick farmers, and the high price of growing rice (diesel and fertilizer prices soaring).

not everything is glum: Joy is supervising a course in agriculture, teaching the kids of local farmers to manage the farm by teaching skills in accounting and business.

------------

another minor observation: Joy had a cold and had pink eye with it (conjunctival irritation). she wasn't very sick. Then our maid got the same symptoms. And several people came here asking for help to pay for eyedrops. 

Hmm...Sounds like we have the latest covid strain. 

But it's harvest time, and there is a fiesta next weekend, so no one is getting tested.