Prawn farming…
I got a text from my tita that they’re harvesting banana’s tomorrow in their farm. Great!, I always wanted to catch up on the latest harvesting technique’s (if there are any.)
The catch… it’s at 5AM in the morning… grarrrr…
I was asking the consultant a while back on when was the right time to harvest bananas, he said… just time it so that you have your banana’s packed when the buyer arrives… ohhhh-kay. Well it doesn’t get any easier than that.
Unlike prawn farming. My dad used to work in a prawn farm so I got to participate in some harvests in their time. Harvesting had to be done at the end of dawn till break of dawn because you didn’t want the prawns to be subjected to heat stress… so you just couldn’t pick a number on the clock on when you felt like starting.
Prawn harvesting was a very manual job in their time (I have no information about it now), what you did was position a net at the gate of the pond and await for the prawns to be caught in your net as the water gushed out… at least 3 guys manned that net… You’d place them in these big heavy containers and somebody would haul them over to a sorting area. Professional sorters would sort the prawn into distinct classes weeding out those with soft shells (prawns are like crabs, they change skins when they grow) as well as small sizes. They would then be placed in these vats with ice in them for delivery to a processing plant… back then exporters would bid for your harvest… great huh?
Of course you had to move quickly before the water in your pond vented out entirely… because if it did, you’d have to then revert to the more manual method of going down to the pond with those big heavy plastic containers and picking them up… and at that time you were racing against the sun so you needed all the help you could get… and that was how I was introduced to child labor… hehehe… kidding…
That prawn farm bombed of course, it seemed like a great idea then because world prices were skyrocketing… then when his bosses decided to jump into the bandwagon, the roof caved in, prices fell and feed prices went up. And those with the highest costs of course, were the first to drop out… the good times lasted for only a year for them… it was all downhill from there on.
Well when my dad left his bosses decided to convert to bangus and of course right now, they’re making millions by exporting it… hehehe…
There were some great things about it though, I got the chance to live by the sea… free beach 24/7… you had to live with the dark tan though… and the tan lines on your side burns when you decided to get a hair cut… hehehe… got the chance to commune with mother nature while I was at it… weekends were spent wading through the corals and watching the indigenous sea creatures… first time for me to see sea urchins and starfishes… not to mention, got the chance to learn the local method of spearfishing… like having a aquatic slingshot (none of that spear gun-crap)… yup, nothing like the sound of the waves to soothe you to sleep… did I mention that corrosion was a way of life?… got introduced to oxidation first hand…
but alas I digress, seems like I’m going to have to take a rain check on that farm visit, since I have to take care of more pressing problems at hand… Namely looking for an ancient trio 64 2mb display adapter for the accounting pc… damn monitor killed it’s display adapter when it decided to commit harakiri…
[source]