K’Tanawat has been experimenting with a small rice paddy on the side of the pond near the pump shed we built. He is using a strain of rice that doesn’t need to be flooded all the time to grow, so it uses a lot less water.

Here are some pictures:

He just watered it a little earlier with water, so it is still wet, but it is still less than the 5-15cm of water depth found in most Thai rice paddies. This is an experiment to see how much rice harvest we get from a small paddy. Enough for personal consumption? Possibly.

I’ve read that people get between 250-800kg of rice per rai per harvest. A rai is 1600 square meters. I haven’t actually measured it yet, but this experiment is somewhere on the order of 50 square meters. So if we actually get comparable yield, we should see somewhere between 8kg and 25kg of rice per harvest. I also read that one serving of rice is 1/4cup uncooked rice. It weighs about 50g and comes out to about 1 cup of cooked rice. This would mean that the harvest comes out to about 5-20 servings of rice per week if we assume two harvests per year.

I also noticed a bunch of “butterfly pea” vines growing on the side of the rice paddy. They have a beautiful blue flower that is sometimes used as a dye and can also be made into a drink.