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Updated: June 5, 2025
The olla and piece of pork were at once put in the basket, and the journey conscientiously continued to the next sementera. Only when food was eaten at the sementera was the halt prolonged. A-sig-ka-cho' is the name of the function of the fourth day. On that day each household owning sementeras has a fish feast.
The field toiler often carries her lunch to the field in the ag-ka-win', and when she returns the basket is usually filled with crustaceans and mollusks picked up in the wet sementera or gathered in the river, or with weeds or grasses to be cooked as "greens." The woman's rain protector, a scoop-shaped affair about 4 feet long, called "tug-wi'," is said to be made only in Ambawan and Barlig.
Sometimes they are along old water courses which no longer flow during the dry season; such are often employed for rice during the rainy season. The unirrigated mountain-side sementera, called "fo-ag'," is built by simply clearing the trees and brush from a mountain plat. No effort is made to level it and no dike walls are built. Now and then one is hemmed in by a low boundary wall.
There are two varieties of sementeras garden patches, called "pay-yo'" in the Bontoc area, the irrigated and the unirrigated. The irrigated sementeras grow two crops annually, one of rice by irrigation during the dry season and the other of camotes, "sweet potatoes," grown in the rainy season without irrigation. The unirrigated sementera is of two kinds.
In some areas, as about Bontoc pueblo, there is practically not a gallon of unused water where there is space for a sementera. A single area consisting of several thousand acres of mountain side is frequently devoted to sementeras, and I have yet to behold a more beautiful view of cultivated land than such an area of Igorot rice terraces.
From two to twenty adults gather in a sementera, depending on the size of the plat, of which there are relatively few containing more than 10,000 square feet. They commonly range from 30 square feet to 1,500 or 2,000. The following description is one of several made in detail while watching the rice industry of the Bontoc Igorot.
The average value of a sementera is 10 pesos for every cargo of palay it produces annually. A sementera producing 10 cargoes is rated a very good one, and yet there are those yielding 20, 25, 30, and even 40 cargoes.
Usually such streams are diverted from their courses, and they are often carried long distances out of their natural way. The second method is to divert a part of a river by means of a stone dam. The third method is still more artificial than the preceding the water is lifted by direct human power from below the sementera and poured to run over the surface.
They transport them by basket to the newly prepared sementera and dump them in the water so they will remain fresh. As has been said, the manure fertilizer is placed about the sementera in piles.
When there are only two children the eldest receives the largest or best sementera, but he must also take the smallest or poorest one. It is said that division of the property of the deceased occurs during the days of the funeral ceremonies. This was done on the third day of the ceremonies at the funeral of old Som-kad', mentioned in the section on "Death and Burial?"
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