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Updated: May 4, 2025
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.
It is claimed that each household owns its dwelling and at least two sementeras and one granary, though a man with no more property than this is a poor man and some one in his family must work much of the time for wages, because two average sementeras will not furnish all the rice needed by a family for food.
The rice sementeras are carefully weeded, "suckers" are pulled out, and the beds are thinned generally, so that each plant will have all needful chance to develop fruit. This weeding and thinning is the work of women and half-grown children. Every day for nearly two months, or until the fruit heads appear, the cultivators are diligently at work in the sementeras.
Much of this labor is performed by water power, much by wind power, and about all the children and old people in a pueblo are busied from early dawn until twilight in the sementera as independent guards. Besides, throughout the long night men and women build fires among the sementeras and guard their crop from the wild hog. It is a critical time with the Igorot.
Practically all the immediate territory on the right hand of the trail between Bagnen and Sagada is occupied by the beautifully terraced rice sementeras of Balugan; the valley contains more than a thousand acres so cultivated. At Sagada lime rocks some eroded into gigantic, massive forms, others into fantastic spires and domes everywhere crop out from the grassy hills.
In the season of 1903, the first rains came April 5, and the first mountain sementera was scratched over for millet April 10, after five successive daily rains. Fertilizing Much care is taken in fertilizing the irrigated sementeras. Into this inclosure dry grasses and dead vines are continually placed to absorb and become rotted by the liquids.
I-na-na' is the first period of the year, and the first period of the season Cha-kon'. It is the period, as they say, of no more work in the rice sementeras that is, practically all fields are prepared and transplanted. It began in 1903 on February 11. It lasts about three months, continuing until the time of the first harvest of the rice or "palay" crop in May; in 1903 this was until May 2.
When the palay is in the milk a great many birds which feed upon it are captured by means of a broom-like bundle of runo. As the birds fly over the sementeras a boy sweeps his broom, the ka-lib', through the flock, and rarely fails to knock down a bird. The ka-lib' is about 7 feet long, 2 1/2 inches in diameter at the base, and flattened and broadened to 14 or 15 inches in width at the outer end.
Earth, carried to or from the building sementeras, in the trails, or about the dwellings, is put first in the tak-o-chug', the basket-work scoop, holding about 30 or 40 pounds of earth, and this is carried by wooden handles lashed to both sides and is dumped into a transportation basket, called "ko-chuk-kod'." This is invariably hoisted to the shoulder when ready for transportation.
Either parent may give a child a gold earring; I know of but one such case. This custom of not allowing an unmarried child to possess permanent property is so rigid that, I am told, an unmarried son or daughter seldom receives carabaos or sementeras until the death of the parents, no matter how old the child may be.
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