Plenty of news about food shortages these days. There's panic buying in the United States, riots all over the world, and the experts predict that things are only going to get worse. Which makes it more important than ever that farmers get crop seeds -- and lots of them -- into the ground.
The New York Times ran a story on Sunday about the use of aerial seeding for rice crops in California. The story says that as rice farming grows in that state (output has doubled in the last ten years, to more than four billion pounds), so called agriculture aviators become ever-more important.
During the three- or four-week planting season that begins in late April, pilots are constantly zooming across California's flooded rice paddies, dropping seeds over hundreds of acres a day in grueling 15-hour shifts. The Times describes a three- to four-minute flight as daredevil work, saying that planes filled with up to a ton of seeds careen back and forth above the paddies, sometimes diving to an altitude of 30 feet before dumping their cargo into furrows dug into paddies prior to flooding. Immediately after each drop, they return to the ground and reload, a process that a top-notch ground crew can accomplish in just 90 seconds.
If you're looking for a safe, stress-free job, this isn't it. Pilots spend their days lurching through the air at speeds of up to 150 miles per hour in small single engine planes, land on tiny airstrips carved out between the paddies, and must fight through the exhaustion that comes from endless hours of flying. And the work itself isn't easy: pilots steer with a foot pedal and joystick, while simultaneously using another lever to open the hold housing the seeds.
Planes have played a role in agriculture since the early 1900's-- best known are the cropdusters that sprayed fertilizer and pesticides starting in the 1920s. In recent years the practice has grown more accurate thanks to GPS navigation systems that will automatically open seed holds when a plane reaches its target area.
Not everyone is in the aerial seeding business. Farmers in Arkansas, the nation's leading rice producer, choose instead to drill seeds into the ground before flooding paddies. John Alter, a former president of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association says it is more accurate than aerial seeding, and less scary. No one likes to get up at daybreak and throw themselves at the ground...." he says. Some of California's pilots might disagree.
Photo: Teo/Creative Commons 2.0
