2011 Rice Harvest Begins

[RedBullHorn]

32 sacks of sticky rice just harvested from our 5 rai. (20kg a sack?)

As it's sharecropped, we received 16 sacks, which I'm guessing should produce about 160kg when milled.

Does that estimate sound about right?

I reckon it is 20kg/sack, paddies are usually stored into a 40-50kg sack, Thai called it "khasop khao see pip or har pip" 1 pip is refer to the metal biscuit bin/container in the past which weight 11kg/pip, so 4 pip sack weight 44kg...but now they'd refer 1 pip as 10kg for easy reference, so 4 pip sack becomes 40kg and 5 pip sack is 50kg. "Hi-Gro" brand fertilizer sack are 50kg type sack. Commercial fish pellet sacks are 20kg and resell at 2-3 Baht/sack, cheaper then "Hi-gro"sack which resell at 6-8 Baht/sack. The fact that fish pellet sack is cheaper, a small percentage of farmer do use fish pellet sack because they'd empty out the sacks of paddies into their paddies storage hut.(a practice to deter/discourage theft by sack)

Apparently ours are "khasop khao har pip", which means our share from the 5 rai is 800-900kg of unmilled sticky rice

Thanks for the info RBH, any idea what the milled weight would be?

"honest" milled weight is 60%...

[olaus]

Thai farmers are conservative and very poor, unwilling to make experiments. Too many creative farmers have lost their ricefields after becoming economically broken.

Farmers in Isaan have normally cattle, which they need to feed on the ricefields as long time of the year as possible.

They also have small, weak tractors, so they have to wait until the soil is very soft before ploughing.

I think these are the main reasons the thai harvest maybe is under normal compared with other countries in the world.