Rice Terraces: Restoring a Vanishing Landscape

Rice terraces are a distinctive feature of rural landscapes in Asia. In centuries past, people in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia dug ditches and irrigation channels hugging the contours of mountains and hills, shoring up the slopes with earth and stone and hewing out plots of distinctly layered rice paddies stretching from valley to mountaintop.

A chalky percher dragonfly (Diplacodes trivialis), discovered in the Gongliao rice terraces.

Two thirds of small yet densely populated Taiwan is mountainous (46% high mountains and 27% slopeland). In its agrarian past, "All that was needed was a river terrace and mountain slope setting, and with tilling and planting, rice terrace landscapes formed," says Hung Hung-chih, professor of the Department of Real Estate and Built Environment at National Taipei University.

Rice terraces are an example of humans making full use of mountain resources, a means of forming a harmonious symbiosis with nature. Despite the inferior natural conditions, these narrow strips of land hewn out of the terrain without mechanized farming, with their high production costs, compounded by inadequate sunlight in the mountains and long growth periods allowing just one harvest per year, provided mountain residents with a steady food source.

Technical specialist Frank Lin of the Forestry Bureau's Conservation Division, who has long been involved in paddy wetland conservation, gives a rough outline of their chief areas of distribution in Taiwan. In the west, they stretch northward of -Miaoli through the mountains of Ba-ling in Fu-xing Township, Tao-yuan County; Heng-shan, Jian-shi and Wu-feng Townships in Hsin-chu County; and the mountains of Hou-long, -Miaoli County. In the east, rice terraces are visible in Feng-bin, Rui-sui and -Fuli in Hua-lien County as well as Chang-bin in Tai-tung County.

In the north they extend along the north coast through San-zhi, Shi-men, Jin-shan and -Wanli on the northern slopes of Mt. Da-tun; also from the mountains of Ping-lin and Shi-ding all the way to Gong-liao and -Shuangxi on the northeast coast. These were all once strongholds for the cultivation of Asian rice (Oryza sativa) and water bamboo (Zi-zania lati-folia) on terraced paddies.

"In the old days in the area between San-zhi and Shi-men, there was a continuous stretch of thousands of hectares of rice terraces running from one mountain to the next. It was a grand sight, but now most have fallen into disuse, with only a few sporadic fields remaining, growing water bamboo shoots," says Lin.

creating a scenic wonderland.

As Taiwan transformed from an agrarian society to an industrial one, population outflow from rural villages led to insufficient manpower in these areas. These had an impact on rice terraces because they were not economically competitive.

Due to the high costs of farming rice on mountain slope terraces, their efficiency and output are inferior to those of flatland fields with their mechanized farming, and as such the demise of terraced fields had already begun two or three decades ago. "The draw of urban employment grew after the North Coast Highway opened in 1978, attracting many young Gong-liao residents to Tai-pei for jobs," says Lin Wen-cui, editor of the Gongliao News.

Taiwan's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2002 accelerated the changing appearance of terraced landscapes throughout Taiwan. In order to mitigate the impact on farmers' incomes of sharp drops in rice prices following the liberalization of the farm produce market, the government enacted regulations aimed at lower-yield, higher-cost areas to encourage fallow periods. The rice terraces bore the brunt of this impact, and farmers switched to higher-earning un-irrigated crops. The switch to sweet potatoes around Jin-shan is a good example.

Development in mountainous regions has also directly and indirectly led to the disappearance of rice terraces. Ruby Fang, director of the Environmental Ethics Foundation of Taiwan (EEFT), notes that in the last decade, major projects such as river improvements and road construction in the mountains have destroyed or rerouted water flows, leading to the rapid disappearance of rice-terrace landscapes.

A black eagle (Ictinaetus malayensis), a protected raptor, soars above the mountains of Gongliao on the northeast coast.

Following the disappearance of lovely rice-terraced mountain vistas from the face of Taiwan, their functions of water and land preservation, water source conservation and biodiversity may die out with them.

"In the memories of older Gong-liao residents, streams would rarely suddenly surge or dry up. During heavy rains, terraced fields and ponds help retain the water, serving as a means of flood prevention," explains Fang.

The irrigation channels and water storage ponds built by farmers increase the capacity and duration of surface water retention. A portion of the rainwater and irrigation water seeps through the soil beds of the fields and watercourses, forming deeper-level groundwater and "return water" for neighboring areas. This is helpful for water resource usage and disaster prevention. Terraced fields can delay the onset of peak flooding from rainfall, reducing 70-95% of surface runoff, in turn preventing loss of soil and silt.

A simulation study by Japanese researcher Yo-shio Ha-yase on the village of Sa-tomi in Iba-raki Prefecture shows that when rice terraces fell idle and 30-centimeter ridges eroded to 5 cm, the reduced water retention capacity led to an increase of 100-year peak flows by 38%, and 50-year peak flows could be recategorized as 25-year peak flows, causing more frequent flooding.

Rice terraces also slow soil erosion on mountain slopes. Academic studies in Taiwan show that terraced fields can hold up over 90% of silt effectively. Each year, one hectare of terraced field can hold back about 22 metric tons of silt, reducing soil erosion and decreasing losses of organic compounds, nitrates and phosphates in the soil, in turn slowing eutrophication and silting in downstream rivers.

In addition, rice terraces are conservation hotspots, a genetic treasury for diverse species.

As agricultural wetlands formed where forests, villages, terraces and streams meet, they are places with high biodiversity and variety-an important habitat for many aquatic plants, fish, reptiles and birds.

However, "The loss of rice terraces is threatening these organisms," says a concerned Frank Lin, who has worked in frog conservation.

Pangolin (Manis pentadactyla).

In response to the ecological problems triggered by the abandonment of rice terraces, the Forestry Bureau proposed the Degraded Habitat Regeneration Management and Ecological Restoration Program. Starting in 2009, the bureau has worked with local governments and civic organizations, promoting demo rice-terrace wetland ecology conservation and restoration work in Ba-yan Village in Jin-shan, Ji-lin Village in Gong-liao, and Gang-kou Village in Feng-bin Township, Hua-lien County.

In February 2011, the EEFT and the community newspaper Gongliao News were commissioned by the Forestry Bureau to carry out the restoration project. Altogether 11 Ji-lin Village farming families (over half of the local farming households) took part, some providing land and others doing field surveys. In all, 2.9 hectares of rice terraces were restored, 1.6 hectares of which was planted with rice using environmentally friendly farming methods, while the remaining 1.3 hectares of abandoned farmland were reconditioned for water retention purposes.

However, restoration work first needs farmers to change their farming habits, such as giving up the use of pesticides and herbicides in favor of environmentally friendly organic farming. But they remained dubious about it, saying, "No pesticides? Is that really possible?"

Says Gongliao News editor Lin Wen-cui, who's in charge of communicating with the residents, at first the farmers didn't understand the restoration project, some preferring to wait and see if it was genuine, and even more of them harboring misgivings about fast-growing weeds on the mountains. If no herbicides were to be used, then more time and manpower would have to be dedicated to suocao weeding.

Suocao is a technique by which farmers pull up weeds by the root, then rub them back into the soil to make a natural humus. While doing that, they also push the surrounding rice roots aside with their hands, enabling the main stalk of the rice plant to grow better.

The farmers wracked their brains on the problem of how not to use pesticides. What farmers fear most following the spring transplant is an insect that gnaws on rice stalks and leaves: the rice leaf beetle (Ou-lema ory-zae). Seventy-four-year-old farmer Uncle A-Shu recalled his boyhood days, when his father fashioned a bug catcher of woven bamboo. He rebuilt one from memory: it's a physical method for pest control. The bug catcher, which looks something like a bamboo dustpan, is swung back and forth among the rice stalks, and the captured beetles become treats for chickens and ducks.

Here, kids witness the arduous process of winnowing husks to produce edible rice.

Soon after rice terrace wetlands are recovered, the clean, pesticide-free environment- provides a habitat where ashy pipewort (Erio-cau-lon ci-ne-reum), -Blyxa au-berti, and Nymph-oides co-re-ana abound. These aquatic plants, familiar to farmers, are disappearing. Seeds of the heartleaf false pickerelweed (Mono-choria va-gin-alis), known to locals as "sleeping beauty," are reawakened after a decade of dormancy buried in the soil, their luxuriant little purple flowers blooming. Fireflies, frogs, freshwater shrimp and field snails have also returned to the fields.

Most refreshingly, the nearly-extinct small damselfly Ce-ri-agrion mel-an-urum, which hasn't been recorded since 1978 and only rested in toxin-free paddies and ponds filled with aquatic plants, has recently reappeared in a 1000-square-meter field in Gong-liao, more than 100 individuals in all. Damselflies and dragonflies, which belong to the order Odonata, are indicators of water purity, and since Gong-liao's wetland environment was revitalized, as many as 50 species have been found there, nearly half of Taiwan's Odonata species.

A small freshwater fish, the Japanese killi-fish (Oryzias la-ti-pes), has almost disappeared with the spread of the introduced mosquitofish (Gam-bu-sia af-finis) as well as pesticide pollution. The EEFT reintroduced the native species from wild streams near Gong-liao, and is restoring them in terraced fields reconditioned for water retention.

"The reappearance of rare species in Gong-liao and their increasing numbers underscore the important role of rice terraces as 'conservation zones outside of conservation zones,'" says Frank Lin. Current ideas of habitat conservation are inspiring residents to re-adopt environmentally friendly production methods.

Farmers in Bayan set ducks loose in their rice paddies to eat harmful insects and apple snails, which helps the rice grow better.

Rice terrace conservation has been going on for over 20 years in Japan. The Sa-to-yama Initiative, passed by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in 2010, advocates the achievement of productive land stressing a harmonious coexistence of man and nature through sustaining biodiversity. "Sato-yama" is Japanese for "mountains bordering villages."

"The restoration of Gong-liao rice terraces is a practical attempt at Sa-to-yama Initiative principles," says Fang. Today Gong-liao residents are once again using their knowledge to farm the mountainsides in an interlocking system of forests, rice terraces, streams, residences and irrigation systems created over the course of a century, in a unique setting that encompasses sustainable farming culture, landscape aesthetic and environmental consciousness.

The environmental value of Gong-liao's rice terraces, beyond just their value in agricultural production, is well worth a second look.

On the topic of water resource conservation, Fang says, "Clear water filtered through terraced fields and forests flows down the -Shuangxi River into the Gong-liao water treatment plant, with 11,000 cubic meters a day supplying the Gong-liao and -Shuangxi areas, and 6,000 cubic meters supplying Rui-fang and the coastal villages. Kee-lung City depends on 65,000 cubic meters a day from here, second only to its reliance on the Xin-shan Reservoir."

NTPU professors Hung Hung-chih and Lee Chen-jai carried out a survey of potential beneficiaries of New Taipei City's rice terrace environment. They first inquired into how much the public was willing to pay for restoration, and then ran the 2010 figures on the ecological and cultural value of the rice terrace wetlands, finding that it could bring NT$470 million in economic benefit for New Taipei City.

However, rice terrace cultivation and harvest requires manpower as well as a channel for rice sales.

During the mid-August harvest season, the EEFT recruited students from universities as well as from Gong-liao and -Daxi Elementary Schools, forming a group in which students pitched in to help with the harvest, thus solving farmers' most troublesome manpower problems.

Because the rice yield from terraced fields is only half that of flatland rice paddies, only 1400 kilograms of unhusked rice were harvested this year, after deducting rice for the farmers' own use. Fortunately, the venerable Hai-shan Cake Shop nearby identifies with the restoration project and is willing to purchase terrace field rice at double the cost, to make more than 3,000 boxes of puffed rice snacks for sale.

The support of the old cake shop gives Gong-liao farmers greater confidence in the rice they produce. Says Lin Wen-cui, "Farmers once thought terraced field rice wouldn't sell and they had no confidence. But when they saw the puffed rice gift boxes that Hai-shan Cake Shop brought for them, they were overjoyed."

Illuminated by an autumn sun, once-moribund rice terraces have gradually found hope for rebirth thanks to the participation of farmers guarding the land. We hope that more people will take part, expanding the areas involved, so that Taiwan's precious and unique paddy wetlands and rich ecology may continue preserving the rural way of life.

Japanese killifish.

Chinese tree frog (Hyla chinensis).

With outward migration from Gangkou Village in Fengbin Township, Hualien County, the area's terraced fields fell into disuse. Today they are gradually being renovated, and once an irrigation channel is completed, they can be planted again.

A farmer catches bugs in a field with a handmade bamboo bug catcher.

Terrace-grown rice is steamed and dried, after which it can be made into puffed rice.

Terrace wetland environments are home to many plants that are useful or decorative.