PADI INDUSTRY, KRIAN. 27 
When the crop is ripe the district presents a very lively appearance, 
as harvesters flock in from all sides. It often happens that in a good 
padi season cholera is rife, the excess population arriving at a time when 
the weather is unusually hot, and water—obtained from surface wells— 
is scarce.and bad, frequently brackish, and teeming with organic matter, 
naturally favours the development of cholera. 
The grain alone is harvested, the straw being left to rot on the land. 
This, no doubt, to some extent explains how it is that the same land 
goes on apparently indefinitely yielding equally good crops of padi 
without a particle of manure. The reaping and threshing is of a most 
primitive nature. In the centre of the field a tub without top or bottom, 
about five feet in diameter and four feet high, made of the bark of a tree, 
is placed on a mat. ‘The reaper, with a short hooked knife that answers 
to a sickle, cuts a handful of corn and takes it to the tub, where he beats 
it over the edge until all the grain falls in. 
Every here and there along the roads in the padi districts Chinese 
shops are to be met with, from which the padi planters obtain their stores 
on credit and pay in grain when the crop is cut. In addition to this, the 
shop-keepers buy the padi in advance, and they sell it as rice. Before 
the harvest begins, the shop-keeper engages three or four Sin-kehs 
(contract coolies) who have to work for him for a year for their food. 
The year of servitude is spent husking padi. A hammer with a heavy 
wooden or stone head falls into a wooden mortar in which the padi is put; 
this hammer works on a pivot through what may be called the centre of 
the handle. The Sin-keh raises the head by stepping on the other end 
of the handle and when he releases it the head falls on the padi in the 
mortar. As the Sin-keh lives on the rice he pounds, and fish, which 
(so near the sea) is very cheap, the cost of husking the padi does not 
come to much. It would be well, therefore, for any one thinking of 
starting a steam rice mill in this district to bear this in mind. 
For 100 gantangs (124 bushels) delivered at the shop, $2.50 to $3 
will be paid at the time of planting. At the harvest time padi used to 
be worth (in 1886) about $6 or $7 per kuncha (160 gantangs or 20 bushels); 
the dollar was then about 3s. 8¢.—7.e., padi was worth about rs. 6d. per 
bushel. I am told that now, with the dollar at 2s. 6d¢., it is worth $9.50 
a kuncha,—z.e., 23s. gd. per 20 bushels, or 1s. 2d. a bushel, but these 
prices constantly change with the market in Penang. 
It is not generally known that the different varieties of rice have 
distinctly different flavours, and that, at any rate in padi districts, it is the 
ambition of well-to-do people to have a large variety in stock, one to eat 
with sweets, another with curries, etc., and that it is, in their opinion, 
other plant might serve as food for this pest between one padi season and the next, and this 
surmise has been found to be correct. The plant—or at least one of them, for there may 
be others as yet undiscovered—is the Indian corn, and the part attacked is the flower 
stalk. As many as five caterpillars are sometimes found to be present in a single stalk. 
The effect on the plant is slight, the flower-head merely withers up before coming to 
maturity. The insect does not seem to attack the larger stalks, and so does not injure the 
crop materially, but nevertheless the subject is of importance, as without some food-plant or 
plants the padi-borer could not survive from one season to the next, and the removal of the 
food-plant or plants would consequently mean the extinction of the pest.—L.W. 
