Quack for help! Rice farmer employs ducks for weed control in China

Need help with weed control? Sounds like a job for a duck squad! A Chinese farmer ‘employed’ 5,000 ducks to help eliminate weeds growing in the rice fields.

Uranus (innovation) sextile Teharonhiawako (weed killers).

A few years ago, a rice farmer in a village close to the city of Jilin, in north-east China, decided to innovate his pest control processes. Taking advantage of nature itself, he started to use thousands of ducks to eliminate weeds growing in the fields and discovered other advantages of employing these special assistance.

As shown in footage recorded in Dongfeng village on Wednesday, the birds march from a farmhouse into the rice field, with farmers guiding them in batches. Currently, around 5,000 ducks assist the farm for weed control.

“I have been growing organic rice for more than ten years. At first, I used manpower to weed. However, now young people are out to cities to work, and the rest are the elderly over 65 years old. Old people can't do heavy work, so now I use ducks to weed and let ducks take the place of farmers”, explained Li Xueming, owner of the rice plantation in Dongfeng village.

The farmer added that using ducks for weeding control can ‘kill two birds with one stone.’ “They can loosen the soil. Moreover, when loosening the soil, duck manure can be used as organic fertilizer”, he said.

“After the ducks march into the field, they will turn around and overwhelm the rice a lot. Through several years of experience, our solution is to guide the ducks in batches manually, following ducks’ own rules to reduce the harm to the rice field”, Li added.

Jilin is the fifth region with the highest annual rice output in China, reaching over 40 million metric tons in 2021.

Minor planet keywords developed by Philip Sedgwick, used with permission http://philipsedgwick.com/

Source: ruptly.tv/