(7) Rice planting in Taiwan.
(a) Chris Banducci, Taiwanese Traditions: The Planting and Growing of Rice. The Taiwan Adventure Blog, Apr 4, 2011.
http://thetaiwanadventure.blogsp ... s-planting-and.html
("These days rice is planted in a more automated way. Small Kubota tractors are equipped with special seedling planting equipment")
* Mr Banducci is a pastor/missionary in Taoyuan, Taiwan, according to the home page of the blog.
* Kubota Corp 株式会社クボタ, based in Osaka, was founded in 1890 by gonshirō KUBOTA 久保田 権四郎.
(b) Hiroshi Fujiki, The Structure of Rice Production in Japan and Taiwan. Economic Development and Cultural Change, 47: 387-400 (1999).
http://www.kier.kyoto-u.ac.jp/DP/DP475.pdf
(Nonetheless, the average tractor in Taiwan works more than ten times as large an area as does the average tractor in Japan. * * * By 1990, 98 percent of rice production was accomplished by machinery in Taiwan. Moreover, as can be seen in Table 3, in 1990, Taiwanese rice production required farmers to spend 238 hours in 1 ha of paddy field on average, while Japanese farmers in the Non-Hokkaido region spent 456 hours in 1
ha of paddy on average, and throughout the process of economic development,
Taiwanese farmers have worked shorter hours than Japanese farmers.5
In short, Taiwanese farms utilize a relatively small number of machines more efficiently than Japanese farms in the Non-Hokkaido region, given an almost identical farm size distribution [in every category of 1-0.5, 0.5-1, 1-2, 2-3, 3-5, 5+ ha]")
* Hiroshi FUJIKI 藤木 裕 is with Bank of Japan.
* The journal is published by The University of Chicago Press.
* ha stands for hectare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hectare
(10,000 square metres (100 m by 100 m); about 2.471 acres)
* "Table 2 THE ARE IN RICE HARVEST PER MACHINE
Machine type................Non-Hokaido (1990)....Taiwan (1990)
Tractor and power tillers...0.53 ha ..............4.67 ha
Power rice planter.........1.04 ha ..............11.30 ha
Combine....................1.62 ha ..............28.18 ha
(c) Planting rice in Taiwan is planing seedlings (not seeds, as in US). Japanese are the same. Here is a video of the latter:
lelepasticcio, Rice Planting In Japan 田植え. YouTube.cm, published on Jan 19, 2013
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjOb8T8Eq3o
("May 22nd 2012 Rice Planting In Japan")
(d) Katia Moskvitch, Black Eggs and Ripe Guava Lead Taiwan's Tech Revolution. BBC, Mar 28, 2013.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21929307
My comment:
(i) guava (Psidium guajava; in Taiwan: 芭樂 or 番石榴)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psidium_guajava
(native to Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America)
(ii)
(A) Mr Zai-Lang JIANG/ Mrs Xiao-Wen YANG (farmer couple) 江再郎先生/楊曉雲女士
(B) Dr Chen-Long CHUANG 莊 欽龍 博士
(iii) The report carried a photo of many Taiwanese farmers planting seedlings (whose caption read, "Many Taiwanese rice farmers still use traditional farming techniques"--credit: Getty Image), though the text talks nothing about rice planting.
The reporter was mistaken. Those farmers participated in a successful effort to break world's record. See
Simon Parker, Rice farmers in Taiwan smash Guinness World Record. ITN, Published on Aug 18, 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHVTuyUwK4E
("1,215 farmers in Taiwan set a new world record for transplanting rice seedlings on a plot of land")
(iv) "Prof Ching-Wei CHENG from the National Chung Hsing University"
鄭 經偉 教授/ 國立中興大學 (at 台中市)
(A) 農業與自然資源學院 生物產業機電工程學系 鄭經偉
http://bimewww.nchu.edu.tw/teacher/Pro_now_10.htm
(博士 美國州立辛辛那提大學航空 / 力學工程所)
(B) 蔡永彬, 好蛋?壞蛋?機器幫你看--「行政院96年傑出科技貢獻獎」得獎人鄭經偉教授專訪. 科學發展月刊, January 2009.
http://web1.nsc.gov.tw/ct.aspx?xItem=10278&ctNode=439#
("臺灣人愛吃皮蛋,全臺灣每天生產皮蛋可達 150 萬顆。 * * * 目前皮蛋的主要生產方法是「浸漬法」,準備一缸缸的強鹼把鴨蛋放入,使蛋白凝固、蛋黃變成綠色,就完成初步處理。在浸漬的過程中,「蛋殼沒有裂痕」是確保優質皮蛋的重要因素。若有破損的蛋混入缸中,鹼液滲透進去和蛋汁混合很容易讓浸泡液變質,甚至導致整缸蛋損壞")
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