- COWS used to help farmers cultivate their soil in paddy fields. With such traditional farming of Bali, farmers may get only once or twice harvest within a year.
- When some farmers totally apply agricultural mechanization, they can take advantage of their cows for tourist attraction.
Plowing soils of paddy field may be just a past activity when farmers had not been introduced to hand tractor or agricultural mechanization. Indeed, they took longer time to cultivate their soils. Besides, the process phase is more complicated as well.
However, what they did is more eco-friendly because the soil was treated naturally. They took aside the soil first, maybe for two or three weeks and wait the grass decomposes. In short, the process is longer but they did not need any additional rice production-supporting materials such as fertilizer because decomposition of wild grass or weeds is enough to fertilize it.
Moreover, when Bali farmers build a cow shed in the middle of rice field or their plantation near rice field, they can sweep away their dried cow dung through gutter passing through their cow shed. By this way, each plot of rice field will get compost of cow dung to support their plants’ growth.
Okay, the development of technology indeed should not be avoided. With this new one, farmers can cultivat their soils faster. Besides, they can also get approximately three harvests a year instead of one or two in convential method.
Since many works of Balinese farmers’ cattle have been replaced by mechanical tools, their cows become idle and grow better because they must no longer work hard to pull plow in the field. Farmers then focus on growing cattle for commodity.
Today, virtually everything should be handled quickly by means of machines. With this easiness, after working in the rice fields, farmers can take side job for additional earnings while waiting for the next phase of works.
However, in this modern time some farmers in particular areas are still taking advantage cattle to plow their irrigated and non-irrigated fields. Nevertheless, this is often considered as a race activity as is no longer implemented. At tourism village, farmers make this farming activity as tourist attraction. So, guests can get an experience to plow rice field by using cattle amid this modern time.
