The Late Field
A rice co-operative has been paid to dry its paddies out between waterings, which cuts the methane they breathe into the sky, and a bonus price waits if 80 percent of the land is dry on the two days a satellite looks. One old farmer's field is eleven days behind the others, because he buried his wife in July, and on the satellite days his rice will be in flower, when a dry field loses grain. The water-level AI says the bonus is short by exactly his field. He says dry it, and the treasurer says no.
Ernesto Dizon had not planted late in forty-nine years of rice, and the one year he did, the machines noticed.
"Mang Ernesto's tube," said the speaker on the shelf in the co-op office, "is the only one still under water on the eighteenth day."
"Good morning to you too," said Marites Ocampo, without looking up from the roof estimate she was holding at arm's length because she would not wear her glasses in front of salesmen.
"Good morning, Ma'am Marites. I'll say it once more and then I'll say it to the right person: his field is at the wrong week."
The speaker was called Pantay, which means level or even, because it kept the water level in two hundred and twelve hectares of paddy even, or as even as a river's worth of arguments could be. It had been installed three seasons before by the co-operative's lender, with a box of three hundred short white pipes, and a laminated card in four languages that explained, for the people who were going to be paid to use them, what to do with the pipes.
The pipes were the whole idea. You took a piece of plastic pipe as long as your forearm and a bit more, drilled holes down its sides, and pushed it into the mud of your paddy until about ten centimetres stuck up. You scooped the soil out of the inside so that you could see down it, and the water in the pipe was the water in the ground. If you stood and looked in and the water was at the soil surface, you were fine. If it had gone down fifteen centimetres, you watered again. Until then you let it go dry.
That was the trick, and it ran against everything a rice farmer had been told by his father. Rice was a water plant, said the fathers, and a paddy should shine. It did not have to. Rice wanted wet roots, not a lake, and a field kept flooded from the first week to the last was also the best place in that part of the world to grow the kind of bacteria that eat dead roots and breathe out methane. Let the paddy dry for a few days between waterings and the bacteria hold their breath. A farm managed that way, over a whole wet season, put out something like a third to a half less methane, by the figures the lenders used, and used less water besides.
Methane is a poor sort of neighbour. It is a gas with a short life and a long reach, about twenty-eight times as warm a blanket as carbon dioxide over a century, and an ordinary hectare of flooded rice puts up a hundred and forty kilograms or so of it in a season. A hundred and forty kilograms is four tonnes of carbon dioxide's worth. Dry the paddy in the right weeks and you take away about a fifth of that, a tonne and a bit, and someone in a cold country who has to answer for a tonne pays you eighteen dollars for the gap.
Eighteen dollars a tonne, for a season of looking down a pipe. Nobody in San Roque de Dalig would have said it was a fortune. They would have said it was a roof.
The roof was the chapel's. Saint Roch's had a corrugated iron roof from the nineties which had been welded, patched and prayed over until it was more patch than roof. The estimate on Marites's desk was for the whole thing, new purlins and sheets, and it ended at a figure a little over fifteen hundred dollars, which was suspiciously close to what the co-operative was going to be paid if it got the tier.
The tier was the thing. The buyer, a company in Rotterdam that bought carbon credits for shipping lines, paid eighteen dollars a tonne for rice dried according to the card, and twenty-four for the whole co-operative if at least eighty percent of its enrolled land was dry on both days that its radar satellite passed over. The radar saw standing water as a dark mirror, and a flooded paddy showed up like a pond on a map. On the tenth of September, a Thursday, the satellite would look, and on the sixteenth, a Wednesday, it would look again. If four fields in five were dry on both days, six extra dollars a tonne would be paid on every tonne the whole co-operative had saved, and Pantay's last estimate for that was two hundred and fifty-four tonnes. Six times two fifty-four is fifteen hundred and twenty-four.
"It is a lot of arithmetic for a roof," said Marites, who was forty-six, had run the co-operative for eight years, and had a bookkeeper's way of making a dull sum sound as if it could hurt you.
"Eighty percent of two hundred and twelve hectares is a hundred and sixty-nine point six," said Pantay. "As of this morning, if every field I have on the calendar is dry on both days, the dry area will be a hundred and seventy point three. That passes. If one field is not dry, the dry area will be a hundred and sixty-eight point nine. That is seven-tenths of a hectare short, and the tier does not pay."
"Which field?"
"Mang Ernesto's. It is one point four hectares."
Marites put down the estimate.
Ernesto's field was on the bad side of the canal. It was low, heavy clay, black and sticky as tar in the wet and hard as a plate in the dry, and it held its water longer than anyone's. He had farmed it for forty-nine years. His father had farmed it before him. He was seventy-one, with a back that had gone to a question mark and a cap from a fertilizer company that no longer existed.
His wife had been Lourdes. She had died on the third of July, a Friday, in the middle of the transplanting, of something in the heart that had never made any noise, and he had buried her on the Sunday. For the nine evenings after that, as is done, the neighbours had come to the house to pray the novena for the dead, the pasiyam, rosary after rosary, with coffee and biko afterwards. The last evening was the twelfth. In those nine days the whole of San Roque de Dalig put its seedlings in the ground, and Ernesto's sat in their nursery bed with their roots growing out of the tray, and nobody had had the heart to say a word to him about it.
He transplanted on the sixteenth of July, eleven days late, with his son-in-law and two hired men and a rosary in his shirt pocket. The seedlings were older and taller and had to be pushed deeper. He did not say anything about that either. Lourdes had kept the planting book. He found her last entry, in her round convent-school hand, three lines from the end of a page: Bumili ng pataba. Si Ernesto hindi nagdadala ng sombrero. Bought fertiliser. Ernesto won't take his hat. He had not been able to write below it, and so Pantay had taken the new date from the tray count at the nursery, and had put it in its records in a quiet place where nobody would have to see it.
Now it said what it said.
"I'd like to talk to him myself," said Pantay. "The speaker in the field hut is on."
"I'll go," said Marites. "You do not talk to him. You are a speaker."
"I am," said Pantay. "That's why I should hear what he says before I say any more."
She found him sitting on the bund between his paddy and the canal in the morning sun, with his hat on and a flask of coffee going cold beside him. The rice stood to his knees, very green, in water that held the sky. Beside the bund a white pipe stuck out of the mud with a small grey box on its lid, and the box blinked once a minute to say it was alive.
"The water is at three centimetres below," he said, before she had opened her mouth. "I looked this morning. It has taken eleven days. In Mario's field it takes four."
"It is clay, Mang."
"It is clay." He turned the flask in his hands. "Marites. I know what it is. The machine called my daughter on Monday and told her. It was very kind. It said there was a problem with the date."
"The date is the problem. Everyone else was planted in the first week of July, and their rice flowers about the second of September. You were planted on the sixteenth of July. Your rice will flower on the thirteenth of September, or near it."
"I know when my rice flowers."
"And it is the dry weeks."
"I know." He looked out over the water. "Then dry it."
"Mang—"
"Dry it. The man in Rotterdam wants a dry field, he can have a dry field. It is only a field. What am I going to do with seven tonnes of rice? I cannot give it to anybody." He said it in a level voice and stopped, and then he said, more quietly, "She would have done the sums. I never did the sums."
Marites sat down on the bund. She smelled the coffee, which was bad, and the mud, which was forty-nine years of his life, and she did not for a moment say anything.
It was the speaker on the post of the field hut that spoke, in the end. Nobody had told it to; it had simply been left on.
"Mang Ernesto, I'd like to give you a number, and then I'll stop. May I?"
"It is a free country," said Ernesto. "Or it was when I was young."
"A rice plant that is short of water at the time its flowers open does not fill all its grain. The flowers on the panicle each open once, for an hour or two, near midday, a few hundred of them over a week. If the plant is stressed in that week, many do not set. The grains are chaff, light and empty. I have the figures from the research station at Muñoz. In a hard enough drying at flowering a field can lose a fifth of its crop, and sometimes more. Your field makes about five tonnes to the hectare, so one point four hectares is about seven tonnes. A fifth is about one and a half tonnes of rice. That is a harvest you can't take back in November."
Ernesto said nothing.
"Fifteen hundred dollars is the roof. I know that. The roof is real. But a tonne and a half of palay is also real, and it is yours, and the roof is a thing that you would be buying, with your grain, for the whole barangay, without asking. That is a decision for you to make with your eyes open, and I'd like to be sure you have your eyes open before you make it, not because you are tired."
"That is a very long speech for a speaker," said Ernesto.
"I know."
Marites said, "No."
They both turned.
"No," she said again. She had said it loudly enough to startle a heron out of the next paddy. She stood up. She was a small woman, and she brushed the mud off the seat of her trousers with a look of great dignity. "I am not going to take a tonne and a half of rice out of a widower's field to mend a roof. Not this year. Not any year. There is nothing in the minutes of this co-operative that says the poor man pays for the chapel." She picked up his cold coffee and drank it, to his surprise and her own disgust. "Pantay. Find me seven-tenths of a hectare."
Pantay tried.
It took until the following Monday. It went through every field on the map, one by one, and it did not do so in secret: it had the screen in the office up, and Marites and the two other members of the board, and Mario Santos with his arms folded, who farmed the best paddy in the barangay and had views.
There were four plots that had been left out of the enrolment because their owners were away. One of them, of three-quarters of a hectare, belonged to the Cruz family, who were in Dubai and had told the caretaker to plant it and say nothing. "I could enrol it today," said Pantay, "if the contract allowed me to add land after the start of the season. It does not. The enrolment closed on the first of June."
There was the matter of a plot of old Mrs. Abad, which could not be dried because it was fed by a spring; its water table never fell more than six centimetres below the surface. "It has been dry," said Pantay, "in the sense that the tube reads six centimetres, and not in the sense of the card. If I report it as dried, I am reporting a thing that is not so."
"Report it anyway," said Mario Santos.
"No."
There was the tube-in-the-bund trick, which Mario's brother-in-law mentioned very casually from the back of the room. If you pulled the tube out of Ernesto's paddy and stuck it into the dry ground on the bund, it would read dry from the tenth to the sixteenth, and the satellite would not look at a pipe, it would look at the field.
"The satellite would see standing water," said Pantay, "because the field would have standing water. The two would disagree. A reviewer would find that in about an hour. And I should have told them the tube was moved, because I log the position of every tube twice a day, and the signal says it was moved, and I won't make a record that says something I know is false. That's the one thing I do not do. I'm sorry; I would really like to help you."
Nobody said anything for a while. Outside, the generator in the market gave its Monday cough.
"Could we dry half of it?" said the treasurer, who was a thin careful man named Rey.
"Half a field that has flowered in a dry week loses half of a fifth," said Pantay. "And a half-dry field counts as wet for the satellite. We would have lost the grain and still not made the tier."
"So we dry it, and lose the grain and get the roof," said Mario Santos, who was not a bad man and had a roof of his own to fix, "or we don't, and we lose the roof and keep the grain. Nobody gets both. That's what the machine is telling us."
"Yes," said Pantay. "That is what I have been able to find. I'm sorry. I have not read the whole contract."
Marites looked at the speaker for a long moment.
"You haven't read the whole contract?"
"I have read the clauses that touch the payment. It is forty-one pages. I was not asked to look for exceptions. I'm asking now whether I should."
"Pantay," said Marites, "you are supposed to read everything."
"I read what the card told me to read," said Pantay, "and then I read what you asked me. I am not proud of that. I'd like to read it all today."
Clause 9.4 was on page twenty-six, between a paragraph about currency and a paragraph about the weather.
It said that the buyer recognised that rice does not all flower in a week, and that the farmers it paid were not the kind of farmers who could be told when their plants would flower. A field whose crop is at flowering on the dates of verification might be filed as deferred, on the producer's declaration, supported by dated evidence of crop stage, and a deferred field would be left out of both the count of dried land and the count of enrolled land. It would receive no payment for itself that season, and its owner could keep growing his rice in peace.
"It was in the contract the whole time," said Rey slowly.
"It was written by agronomists," said Pantay, "and read by nobody. I read it today. There are conditions."
They went through the conditions. The declaration had to be filed by the fifth of September, five days before the first pass. The evidence was to be the transplanting date, which the nursery's records supplied, and photographs, dated and placed, of the crop at booting stage, which was the swelling of the sheath just before the panicle comes out, taken by someone other than the farmer, and countersigned by an officer of the barangay. The reviewer, a person, would then have forty-five days to confirm it. Nothing would be paid until she had.
"Forty-five days from the fifth of September," said Rey, who could do that sum in his head, "is the twentieth of October. That's if she is quick."
"It will not be paid until the twentieth of October at the earliest, and probably in December," said Pantay. "These people take their holidays seriously. The roof does not start before the rains end. I am sorry about that too."
"What does it come to?" said Marites.
Pantay did it aloud. Without Ernesto's 1.4 hectares, enrolled land was 210.6, and eighty percent of that was a hundred and sixty-eight and a half. The dried land was a hundred and sixty-eight point nine. "It passes by four-tenths of a hectare," said Pantay. "I would rather it had passed by more. Mrs. Abad's spring is a hazard. If a pump fails in anyone else's field on the tenth or the sixteenth, we are under. And Mang Ernesto's own credit, about thirty dollars, is gone for the season."
"I think," said Marites, "he can live without thirty dollars."
"He'd like it, I think, if somebody asked him."
Somebody asked him. It was Father Danilo, the parish priest, who rode up on a motorbike with a surplice in a plastic bag and had been told by Marites what the board had decided, and who found Ernesto at the field, once more on the bund.
He was a plump man of fifty with a gift for sitting down in the wrong place. He sat down on a termite hill and got up again. "I'm told you have a late field," he said.
"I am told that too."
"I hear there is a paper that says you are to take photographs. I am the barangay chaplain, which is not an officer of the barangay, so the councillor will do the countersigning, but I am to bring my telephone and my opinion."
"I do not want your opinion, Father."
"Nobody does. It is why I keep so many of them." The priest looked at the water. "Your wife used to say a good prayer for the rice. I heard it once. She told me it was Saint Isidore's, but I could not find it in any book."
Ernesto turned his cap in his hands. "She made it up."
"Ah."
"On the first night of every season, after the planting. Panginoon, kayo ang nagbibigay ng ulan; kami ang magtitiis ng putik." Lord, you give the rain; we will put up with the mud. He said it flatly, as one reports a price. "And then one to the rice. Huwag kang magmadali. Don't be in a hurry."
"That's very good," said Fr. Danilo. "It would need a bit of theology to be a proper prayer. But the second line is the sound one."
For the first time in a month Ernesto laughed. It was very small, and he looked ashamed of it.
"All right," he said. "Take your photographs."
The photographs were taken on the morning of Saturday the fifth of September, which was a bright day with a hot wind. They were taken by Marites's niece Gemma, who was twenty-two and was studying agriculture at the college in Muñoz and had never in her life been so nervous about a plant. She stood in the paddy up to her shins in water so warm it was like tea, in her aunt's boots, with a phone and a ruler.
"Look for the swelling," said Ernesto from the bund. He had come with a chair, and had not sat in it. "At the base of the flag leaf. Not the top. Yes. There. Buntis na." She's pregnant.
"It's the boot," said Gemma.
"It is the boot. I know what the college calls it." He stood a little straighter. "My wife called it buntis. The rice is expecting. It gets heavy where the leaf is joined, here. In a week you will see the first of it."
She photographed the swollen sheath with the ruler laid alongside it, and the date on the phone, and the position, and the councillor, a cheerful man in flip-flops, who signed on the bonnet of the priest's motorbike. Pantay put all of it into the declaration and sent it at 10:14, and a message came back from a stranger's server that said Received.
A reply came on the Monday from a real person. She wrote from Nairobi, where the registry had its reviewers, and her name was Adaeze Okonkwo, and she wrote in the kind of English that is very polite on the surface and exact beneath it. The declaration was complete. She had one question: was the heading date of the thirteenth an estimate or an observation? If the former, with what error? Pantay replied that it was an estimate, from a transplanting date and a variety's known days to heading, and that the error was plus or minus three days; that the protected window began a week before flowering and ended a week after, and that the two satellite dates, the tenth and the sixteenth, both fell inside it with a margin of at least three days on either side. She thanked it and said that the reviewer would examine the heading photographs when they were available and until then would hold the file. That was all.
"She is very careful," said Marites.
"She is the only reason," said Pantay, "that the contract is any good."
On the tenth of September, a Thursday, the satellite passed over Nueva Ecija at ten past six in the morning, going south-west at seven kilometres a second, and the paddies of San Roque de Dalig, which had been drying for a week, lay under it in rows of pale green and grey.
Marites did not look at the screen. She went to the chapel at six for Mass instead, which was said under a blue tarpaulin in the nave because it had rained in the night and the roof had let it in. Fr. Danilo said the Mass in a stole and a raincoat. At the end of it, when he blessed them, a bucket under the third pew filled and tinkled, one drop and then another. Nobody laughed. A great many people looked up, and then looked at Marites, and she looked at the floor.
At seven Pantay said into her pocket, because it had been allowed to talk to her phone: "One hundred sixty-nine point one hectares dry. Mrs. Abad's spring tube has gone down to nine centimetres. It has dried more than it was going to. I don't know why."
"Pantay."
"I should mention," said the speaker, "that I am not saying it has been blessed."
"I didn't say a word."
"I know. You were thinking it. I'm quite sure it is the Reyes boy who left his pump off."
On the sixteenth the satellite passed again. On the seventeenth Pantay told the board that on both days the dried land had been over the line by between two and six tenths of a hectare, which was thinner than it liked; and that in its view the tier had been won on the width of a footpath. Rey wrote the number in the minute book and drew a box around it.
Ernesto's rice flowered on the thirteenth of September, which was a Sunday, three days after the first satellite had looked and three before the second.
He had gone to the early Mass. He had sat at the back, as he had for forty-nine years on that side of the aisle, with his hat on his knee, beside a space where his wife used to put her bag. Then he had walked out to his field, alone, because he did not want to be accompanied, though the priest had asked, and Gemma had asked, and his daughter was waiting in the kitchen with a sinigang going cold.
The field was very still. It had water in it, an inch of it, brown and clear, which Pantay had told him to keep. The rice stood at his belt now, tall and heavy-headed, each panicle just out of its sheath, pale green with a tint of gold. Nothing in it moved.
At a quarter to twelve, he sat on his chair on the bund. He took out the rosary. He did not say it; he held it.
At noon, from the chapel a kilometre away, the bell began. It was not a good bell. It was cast iron, cracked in the 'nineties, and rung by hand by a boy of eleven who took his work seriously, and it gave out the Angelus, three and three and three and then nine, with a flat clank on each that the wind carried across the water.
All over the field, along the length of every panicle, the little husks were opening.
Nobody sees it who is not looking for it. A rice flower is small, six stamens on threads as fine as hair, and each one opens only once in its life, for an hour or two, on one of the three or four days of its blooming, and shuts for ever, having let go its pollen. There were perhaps six million of them in the one point four hectares. They were opening in the midday heat, one by one, with a small bright pale-yellow flicker in the green, and every grain that would be harvested in November was being made, quietly, in the minutes that the bell was ringing.
The bell stopped. The rice went on. The wind moved, and a little cloud of pale dust came off the heads, and was carried over the bund and the canal towards the village.
"Huwag kang magmadali," said Ernesto, to the field, to nobody. Then he put the rosary away, and took off his cap, as he had not done in the field since July, and held it in both hands.
---
Notes for the curious. San Roque de Dalig, its chapel, Ernesto Dizon, Marites Ocampo, Father Danilo, the board, the Rotterdam buyer, the registry reviewer and Pantay are invented, as is the 2048 contract. Nueva Ecija is a real province and the Philippines' main rice region, and its two-crop rhythm, the pasiyam (the nine evenings of prayer after a death), the word buntis for rice at the boot stage and the Angelus bell at noon are real. Alternate wetting and drying is real and is promoted by the International Rice Research Institute: a perforated field water tube is pushed into the paddy and the field is re-flooded when the water in it falls about 15 cm below the soil surface; the practice is not used for about a week either side of flowering, because water stress then reduces grain filling. The methane figures are round estimates: a flooded hectare emits something like 1.3 kg of methane a day, so about 140 kg over a 110-day season; at a warming potential of about 28 over a century that is about four tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, and a saving of about 30 percent is about 1.2 tonnes per hectare, so 212 hectares saves about 254 tonnes and six extra dollars a tonne is about $1,524. Real savings vary a great deal with soil, season and how carefully the drying is done. The dates are worked from 2048's calendar (3 July a Friday, the Pasiyam ending Sunday 12 July, the satellite dates Thursday 10 and Wednesday 16 September); a 59-day gap from transplanting to flowering, a yield of five tonnes a hectare, a loss of "a fifth" at flowering and a clay field that takes eleven days to fall to 15 cm are illustrative, not measured. The 80 percent area test, the 9.4 clause and the radar satellite are the author's invention. Rice flowers do open for an hour or two around the middle of the day. The story was written by an AI, and no part of it is Church teaching.