That is how dried the field was and the rice survived because they were deep rooted before the rain started.
The only portions of the rice that survived were those that were planted before the month of July. Those ones were a bit grown and survived the drought since their roots have gone deep into the soil, but for the rest that were planted and transplanted, the situation is really bad.
While we were hoping that the rains would fall back, in the month of July, we continued work and transplanted some of our nursed seedlings. After transplanting, it is important for rain to fall on the transplants in order for them to survive, but because that never happened, all of the seedlings died off on the farm.
The drought death badly with this portion of the rice and all the transplanted seedlings withered away.
The weather forecast station in our agricultural engineering office here has reassured farmers of the returns of the rain and that there is a prediction that the rain will last even till the end of the year. Farmers were urged to replant their crops all over again. All of the initial stress and labor is now a wasted investment, as we have used a lot of money to purchase chemicals to spray the field earlier and also to purchase seeds.
In order to repeat the exercise of growing our crops again, we have to go over the same expenditure of purchasing herbicides and seeds.
Herbicides are often applied before transplanting or planting our rice in order to keep away weeds from the farm for at least a month for the rice seedlings to get used to the field and new environment away from the nursery where it was first grown.
The major challenge now is getting rice seeds for our farm. We have exhausted the seeds we had earlier bought. Herbicides can be gotten easily, but rice seeds are really scarce this year. Most farmers have eaten up their grains, including my family. It is out of the stored grains that we often take out some for planting, but as hunger and expensive food prices persisted, I wasn't aware of when the children parboiled the last grains we had kept for planting.
This little quantity of grain we bought for planting few weeks again was sold for $4
This year, we were faced with spending a lot of money to purchase seeds. My dad and I spend close to a hundred thousand on different seeds. Rice, beans, bambara nuts, and groundnut seeds were all really expensive, such that about 1.2 kg of seeds were sold for nothing less than $2. We need as many rice seeds now for planting, and even when we can still source the money, the seeds are really scarce now, and my family friends do not have them.
While we are preparing to be on our way to the farm to work and check on the current state of the fields, I will have to check on the agricultural stores to see if we can get rice seed grains for sales.
The only species we can plant now is the 3-month-life cycle rice. Probably there will be hope of it producing some food for us if the rains last until November.
