Farmer Rachel

Earlier this year we planted rice, and today we're going to harvest rice!

This machine picks the rice stalks and bundles them together.

This is a small rice paddy so the machine is kinda small,

but some of them get really big!

Now we're going to go to a larger rice paddy and use a bigger machine!

We can't tell who you are anymore.

This mask is fine.

All ready!

It's super muddy!

I've been saving these boots for 5 years for a day like this!

He said to put these over there.

We have to line up the bundled rice stalks in rows so it's easier to feed them into the machine.

Spider.

There are TONS of them here.

There were THOUSANDS of spiders here, no joke. This isn’t a job for arachnophobes!

Uncle, is this a river snail?

Jumbo river snail.

Jumbo river snail!

It's huge.

Grasshopper?

Look!

Oh, a grasshopper?

Yep.

Look, that spider's green!

Huh? Look.

Bye, buddy!

There are tons of them in America, too.

Are you ready?!

YEAH!

You flatten out the rice bundles and then slide it into this machine.

The machine uses the magic of technology to pick off all the rice and deposit them in a bag.

Is it fun?

Yeah! :D

It probably took about 2 hours to finish this rice paddy.

Work hard!

Jun wore the wrong shoes.

And my jeans... but it's all right if they get dirty.

This is what you should wear.

How was it? Are you tired?

No, not at all.

All I had to do was stand there and put rice in the machine.

After harvesting rice I really want to eat onigiri. Do you get that feeling?

Nope, sorry.

I guess you're not Japanese enough yet.

Use this and go buy us some onigiri.

Okay.

Hey, hey, see?

We want onigiri!

I told you.

Onigiri.

See!

How heavy is it?

How many kilograms are these?

Less than 20kg.

About 15kg?

More than that.

Yay, good job!

Here farmers can take their rice and then sell it.

If you look closely, you can see that the rice still has a shell on it.

To remove the shell you have to use another machine.

After the shell is removed, you have brown rice.

And then if you want white rice, you need to use ANOTHER machine to polish it.

We made a video of that machine before.

There's so much!

Done.

Here we are back at our apartment!

Yay~

This is the rice that we got from my uncle.

And this is genmai.

Genmai is brown rice,

aka rice that doesn't have a shell anymore but it hasn't been polished

so it still has a bunch of nutrients on it,

which some people don't like.

Yeah, because it tastes a little bitter, I guess.

I like it.

And it's really hard.

And this is hakumai.

White rice.

Yeah, literally white rice.

So after we take it to a machine and polish it, it turns into this.

Yeah, polishing.

And actually I have a cooking channel and I made koi fish sushi

with the rice I got from my uncle.

So if you're interested, please check it out!