Return to Fianar

Under grey skies we made the drive from Tana to Fianar. The rains have come to Madagascar

finally and have produced a flurry of activity in the rice paddies as farmers prepare for another growing season. On the central plateau—where both Tana and Fianar are situated—most paddies are terraced on hillsides with surprising precision in order to control water for irrigation. Fields have their own personalities and are unique in almost every way: size, shape, and fertility. The result is a mosaic landscape of shifting colors and textures as parcels move through the growing process.

Understanding their fields’ personalities, farmers let the paddies set the pace of the various tasks required to bring a crop of rice to harvest. In early fields, we saw men with long-handled spades drive their blades into heavy-textured soil to aerate and incorporate last year’s crop residue into the soil. Medium fields had men driving teams of omby (cattle) harnessed behind harrows through inundated paddies to break up clods and prepare a seed bed. From my roadside vantage point, it was hard at times to discern whether the farmers of the omby were calling the shots. Some parcels were electric green with closely planted rice seedlings. And, in other parcels, women placed these seedlings into inundated ground, using a piece of string pulled tight between two sticks as a guide for the rows. In a few more weeks, rice plants will be tall and setting seed and soon people’s spirits (and bellies) will grow.