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Updated: May 1, 2025
Masses of palms, dark green bamboos, and other tropical growths fill up the distance. In the foreground are irrigated rice terraces, with gleaming waters and the freshest of verdure. Here copper-coloured natives are at work. Men are ploughing the wet soil of the sawahs with buffaloes; women often with their babies slung on their backs with their long scarfs are hoeing, or weeding, or reaping.
In sawahs however the surface has in general so little consistence that no furrow is perceptible, and the plough does little more than loosen the stiff mud to some depth, and cut the roots of the grass and weeds, from which it is afterwards cleared by means of a kind of harrow or rake, being a thick plank of heavy wood with strong wooden teeth and loaded with earth where necessary.
I have already described the simple but effective plough to which he is yoked when working the sawahs, and the methods employed by the natives for the cultivation of rice. From almost any elevated point it is possible to get views of the sawahs in the neighbourhood of Buitenzorg. The form and extent of the separate fields divided by the water-courses vary with the nature of the country.
The produce of the grounds thus tilled is reckoned at thirty for one; from those in the ordinary mode about a hundred fold on the average, the ladangs yielding about eighty, and the sawahs a hundred and twenty. Under favourable circumstances I am assured the rate of produce is sometimes so high as a hundred and forty fold.
Sawahs are plantations of padi in low wet ground, which, during the growth of the crop, in the rainy season between the months of October and March,* are for the most part overflowed to the depth of six inches or a foot, beyond which latter the water becomes prejudicial.
They are not however ignorant of such expedients, and works are sometimes met with, constructed for the purpose chiefly of supplying the deficiency of rain to several adjoining sawahs by means of sluices, contrived with no small degree of skill and attention to levels. In the Transactions of the Batavian Society the following mention is made of the cultivation of rice in Java.
After ten or fifteen days they are hoed again, so that any places not reached by the plough or hoe may be laboured, and the intervening banks kept free from weeds and consequently made porous. The large sawahs are also harrowed with the garoe; and, finally, small trenches are cut for the water to flow from one terrace to another.
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