59 minutes ago, dinsdale said:

Yep. This is the problem. You can plough the fields after harvest but this can result in damage to the plough disk. Farmers have to pay for any damage. Burning is pretty well free. Rice prices per kilo for the farmers has not been good, 'Powder' for the rice has gone up so pretty well cost of growing to returns are marginal at best or negative. Burning will continue. Effective and cheap.

Burning is certainly not necessary and is, in my opinion, counter productive. It kills off useful microbes in the topsoil and the amount of carbon left after burning is insignificant.

Disc ploughing does not damage the plough but it is difficult with rice straw on the field because the discs can't cut through the straw to plough the soil below.

Better to do what I do and hire a bailer to come and clear the straw. The bails can be sold easily enough and the field is cleared for ploughing.

The truth is that farmers have been doing this burning for years and they see no reason to change that. It is cheap, easy and..........well, fun.

3 hours ago, GreasyFingers said:

Correct, but these people have not head of Thomas Sewell:

"Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God"

It's a statement that many people innocent of knowledge derive great comfort from since, to their way of thinking, it puts them on a level footing with those who actually know something about a particular field of study.

Edited May 17, 20224 yr by placeholder

9 hours ago, placeholder said:

It's a statement that many people innocent of knowledge derive great comfort from since, to their way of thinking, it puts them on a level footing with those who actually know something about a particular field of study.

Are you saying I have intellectual myopia.

Why do you get methane? Because (apart from dead plants rotting) is because as the paddy field is flooded, the soil is waterlogged and all the oxygen in the soil is used up by microbes - so only the methane producing ones are left. Cereal crops grown on 'dry' land have more oxygen in the soil as not waterlogged, so methane production is low.

Rice farmers should change to Corn, Millet or Sorghum, then methane production would drop - however hard to get fields which are not waterlogged in tropical wet seasons - hence rice.