Friday, February 26, 2010

Friday, February 26, 2010
Suphanburi

Today our itinerary calls for us to visit some of the agriculture-related businesses of Suphanburi Province. The first stop of the day was at a fish farm.

This was not your ordinary farm breeding fingerling trout for stocking local Virginia rivers. This fish farm was comprised of five lakes, covering some 280 acres! Upon arriving we came upon a huge mound of small, dead fish waiting to ground up and mixed with rice to form a paste-like patty, that will be used to feed the other fish in the ponds – at a rate of 44 tons a day.

The farm produces essentially two species of fish. Snakeheads, that invasive species that has created horrendous problems in Virginia and Maryland ponds because of their voracious appetites and their ability to move out of water, on land, from one pond to another, are a popular fish crop – precisely for that ability to remain out of water for up to ten days. This makes these two-to-five pound fish ideal for transporting live to a wide range of markets. We were told that they are very tasty.

The second species produced by this farm were catfish – catfish weighing over 220 pounds! While we were standing there, a pickup truck pulled up with a bed of live catfish. Two very strong men hoisted one of these gigantic fish out of the truck so that we could take photos. This experience certainly put a new face on what we know as “fishing”.

From fish farms we next traveled to a pig farm. This farm, on a far smaller scale than the fish farm contained “only” 300 pigs. The farm did not breed pigs, but instead, purchases small 40-pound piglets and with carefully controlled diets and extreme hygienic conditions, (the pig sties are covered with mosquito netting to prevent them from carrying disease,) they stay at the farms for several months, until they reach about 200 pounds, and then are sold at market.

The last stop of the morning was a rice production plant. Rice is probably the most important crop in Asia. The basis of every meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner, is rice. In central Thailand, which we just touched the edge of, there are rice fields as far as the eye can see. This plant, which has been in the same family for generations, takes the rice grain, shells the husks, processes it through several steaming and roasting steps, and produces the final product which is shipped out in huge bags. It appeared as if much of the equipment being used had been there when the plant first opened – but it still worked so why change it?

We had lunch at a restaurant that could only be described as hole-in-the-wall yet, as usual, the food was delicious. It seems like you can’t go wrong in Thailand when it comes to eating!

After lunch we went to a large plant nursery, with seemingly endless rows of every conceivable type of plant, from wonderful varieties of orchids to life sized topiary horses rising on their hind legs while pawing the air with their forelegs. I was also particularly interested in the visiting birds and spied a species of sparrow that I had never seen in the USA. Sometimes one finds treasures even when not looking for them!

Our last stop of the day before returning to our hosts for dinner, we made one final stop at a laboratory that was cloning plants, so that only the best species would continue to be sold for planting. To me this had a Darwin +one quality to it. I wondered to myself that the question of ethics even entered my head when it came to asparagus and bananas, how would I feel about similar procedures in other species.

Now that’s a lot of end-of-the-day thinking.