The Pest/Disease that almost ruined my farm Contest

Army Worm Caterpillar
Source

• What do you cultivate?

OK, first let me be clear, the last thing I think I will ever be, is a farmer. I once tried planting radishes, based on the fact that they are ready for use twenty one days after planting. Well I had a small area maybe five feet by ten feet, but boy were those plants growing, it was a sea of green, but on the twenty first day that I was going to harvest my crop not a single plant gave me a radish. I tried corn, and just as they were about to produce some pest got it, I planted tomato and it froze and this in a tropical climate. So no, my experience with farms is as a helper to one friend or other. And I do have an anecdote about a pest that was destroying a friend's rice farm.

• What was that pest,disease of event that wanted to destroy and frustrate your labour on the farm

So this happened over 35 years ago and until today that I see this contest I looked up what was attacking my friend's crop. And I must say it was a beautiful plantation, about 30 hectares of rolling land, green as far as you could see with knee high rice plants. Now my friend was a mechanic Engineer recently come back from the Philippines where his father was a high level executive in a banana farm. So he was good with mechanizing agricultural activities, good at inventing implements, but franly he was just as bad as I at farming. I really don't know what got him into planting rice.

But the thing is, just when it looked like he was going to hit a homerun, his rice plantation was attacked by some type of worm according to him. Now I was, in those days just bumming around town, he had bought an insecticide named Tamaron for rice worms, the worst smelling thing I have ever smelled. He told me as I was doing nothing if I could help him out just checking that the workers who were applying the poison would not steal the insecticide which was quite expensive. I accepted mainly because it was something different to do in a very sedentary life I was leading and i was also helping out a friend, no money was involved I just asked for lunch, it was, i figured a fun thing to do.

• How did you handle it?

The insecticide really worked , i mean those caterpillars fell by the hundreds, the application was very easy, my friend had some motor pumps and you just walked a straight line and covered some ten feet of right and left from where you walked, I did some spraying myself, it was fun and easy, just the smell sucked. After a couple of weeks, the caterpillars that remained bloomed into butterflies and flew away. Some people told us that these caterpillars were part of rice planting always appeared and would just fly away causing no serious damage to the crop. I always thought that was the case but today I have read that actually enough of these caterpillars can destroy even huge rice plantations. who knows, they sure did not destroy my friend's crop.

• Did you learn anything from your experience, if yes share with us.

First and most important thing I learned is, if you are hired or just decide to help out in a case like this, make sure what they are using is not Tamaron or something like it, that smell is incredible. Second thing, even if old farmers tell you something don't actually believe it all, they can be trying to pull your leg. Nowadays with the internet a few minutes of reading can go a long way into solving your problems, which might not even be problems. And of course as I said I learned for good that I am not meant to be a farmer.

As an after thought I must say things did not turn out so good for my friend, he had contracted a combine harvester, but there was some flooding so the machine got to the farm a few weeks late, the rice was already quartered, in Spanish they say cuarteado, better said it has cracked so is not first class rice, which means it does not bring the price first class rice has. So my friend, even though he did not lose, also did not quite make as much money as he thought he would. He did try again the next season but by then I had gotten a job in another city so I do not know how it went.