Fields of Rice

I grew up in the Pennsylvania countryside where corn fields are a common sight.  After college, I lived in a few different states and was fascinated by seeing huge fields of other crops.  In eastern Tennessee there were lush fields of tobacco, in southern Georgia there were fields of fluffy white cotton, and here in Korea there are bright green fields of rice.

The rice fields are rectangular sections of land surrounded by low earthen embankments.  When I first arrived here, these fields were nothing more than dry dirt.  Once the temperature started to warm up, these fields were tilled, smoothed, and flooded with a few inches of water.  The rice plants are grown to young seedlings before they are planted in the fields.  They look like small sprigs of tall grass.  Some of the fields are planted using a 'rice transplanter' machine and others are actually planted by hand.  The rice is typically planted in May and harvesting begins in October.

The photos below are in order to show the growth of the rice over the past couple months.  Currently, the fields of rice look like carpets of tall, thick, soft grass.

An aerial view of a nearby village surrounded by rice fields - Google Maps screenshot.

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"Rice is a beautiful food.  It is beautiful when it grows, precise rows of sparkling green stalks shooting up to the summer sun.  It is beautiful when it's harvested, autumn gold sheaves piled on patchwork paddies.  It is beautiful when it's cooked, pure white and sweetly fragrant."

~Shizuo Tsuji