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Updated: June 4, 2025
Irrigated rice lands are commonly leased. Such method of cultivation is resorted to by the rich who have more sementeras than they can superintend. The lessee receives one-half of the palay harvested, and his share is delivered to him. The lessor furnishes all seed, fertilizers, and labor.
All terrace walls are built of these undressed stones piled together without cement or earth. These walls are called "fa-ning'." They are from 1 to 20 and 30 feet high and from a foot to 18 inches wide at the top. The upper surface of the top layer of stones is quite flat and becomes the path among the sementeras.
However, when a man possesses twenty sementeras he is considered rich. The richest man in Bontoc, with one hundred sementeras, has in them, say, 3,330 pesos worth of real property in addition to his 6,340 pesos of personal property.
A huge bowlder in the ground means hours often days of patient, animal-like digging and prying with hands and sticks before it is finally dislodged. When the ground is leveled the soil is put back over the plat, and very often is supplemented with other rich soil. These irrigated sementeras are built along water courses or in such places as can be reached by turning running water to them.
During June and July these same girls gather the camote vines for pig food. About August this labor falls to the women. Mention has also been made of the fact that during the latter half of April and May the boys and girls of all ages from 6 or 7 years to 13 or 14 guard the palay sementeras against the birds from earliest dawn till heavy twilight.
Early in the morning some member of each household goes to the mountains to get small sprigs of a plant named "pa-lo'-ki." Even as early as 7.30 the pa-lo'-ki had been brought to many of the houses, and the people were scattering along the different trails leading to the most distant sementeras. If the family owned many scattered fields, the day was well spent before all were visited.
In the pueblo, the sementeras, and the mountains one knows he is always surrounded by a-ni'-to. They are ever ready to trip one up, to push him off the high stone sementera dikes or to visit him with disease.
Such as are in the mountains receive neither herding, attention in breeding, feed, nor salt from their owners. The young are dropped in February and March, and their owners mark them by slitting the ear, each person recognizing his own by the mark. A herd of seventeen, consisting of animals belonging to five owners, ranges in the river bottom and among the sementeras close to Bontoc.
The dead fall drops when the rat, in touching the trigger, releases the lower end of the cord. The animal springs the trigger either by nibbling a bait on it or by running against it, and is immediately killed, since the dead fall is weighted with stones. Sementeras near some forested mountains in the Bontoc area are pestered with monkeys.
The planter leans enthusiastically over her work, usually resting one elbow on her knee the left elbow, since most of the women are right-handed and she sets from forty to sixty plants per minute. When the sementeras are planted they present a clean and beautiful appearance even the tips of the rice blades twisted off are invariably crowded into the muddy bed to assist in fattening the crop.
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