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Jakarta farmers earn living harvesting rice
City farm: Sarif, a worker from Indramayu, West Java, works in a rice field in Semanan, West Jakarta, on Monday
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City farm:: Sarif, a worker from Indramayu, West Java, works in a rice field in Semanan, West Jakarta, on Monday. The Jakarta administration says that the total area of rice fields in West Jakarta has declined sharply from 250 hectares in 2013 to 141 hectares in 2015 due to the rapid expansion of the property sector. (JP/RBK) (JP/RBK)
City farm: Sarif, a worker from Indramayu, West Java, works in a rice field in Semanan, West Jakarta, on Monday. The Jakarta administration says that the total area of rice fields in West Jakarta has declined sharply from 250 hectares in 2013 to 141 hectares in 2015 due to the rapid expansion of the property sector. (JP/RBK)
Darkono, 35, pulled a toy rifle's trigger to shoo away birds that were making an attempt to land on his paddies in a 4.5-hectare rice field in Semanan, Kalideres, in West Jakarta.
'Birds are farmers' number one enemy in Jakarta. The rice fields are small in the city, but there are lots of birds and they are a big worry,' he said.
Darkono is one of the few farmers left in Semanan. The farmers in the area work on somebody else's land because the land is already owned by either a rich individual or a property developer.
'We only need to pay Rp 7 million [US$525] to a middleman after each harvest for the use of the land,' he told The Jakarta Post recently.
He and his father Sukra, 60, who have worked on the land since 2001, manage to bring in two or three harvests a year. They plant what they call IR-Kerbau paddy that matures in about 125 days.
'Last May we harvested 24 tons of paddy that were sold for around Rp 4,500 per kilogram. Thus we got around Rp 108 million, from which we put Rp 50 million into our savings,' Darkono said.
Rice at the market is priced at between Rp 9,000 to Rp 15,000 per liter, which is less than a kilogram.
He explained that the family incurred only Rp 6 million in expenses on each hectare of the farm, expenses that include labor, fertilizer and pesticides. They save much by having their own tractor and hiring cheap workers from Pemalang, Central Java, during every planting and harvest season.
'We use water from the drainage for irrigation, channeling it from underground drains into our rice fields,' he said.
The main problem, besides the birds, is the procurement of diesel fuel for their tractor. They have to buy the fuel in bulk to transport it to their farm.
'We are not allowed to buy it by the jug so we have to pay to rent a truck,' he said.
Besides earning a living by farming, the family does other jobs. Darkono still goes back to Indramayu because he is a mechanic there. He will just go to Jakarta when his father does not have enough laborers during the planting and harvest seasons.
'My sibling, Zulaeha, 27, opens a warteg [sidewalk food stall] and Andriana, 18, works as a laborer in a nearby factory while studying in a university,' the oldest from the three said.
The farming idea came to the family in 1995 when they sold their 3,000-square-meter farmland in Indramayu to get business and living capital for the big city. They first moved to Serpong, in Tangerang, before moving to Semanan in 2001.
'Farming a small tract of land is not cost effective,' said the tanned man.
Darkono's opinion might prove true. A few hundred meters from their land, behind the Kopti housing complex, is a 16-hectare paddy farm cultivated by Indramayu people.
Sarif, 45, is one of them. He works on a 1.5-hectare plot of land from which he got around six tons of Ciherang paddy in May and earned Rp 22 million from the sales.
'However, I have to pay at least Rp 12 million in expenses including for tractor rental so I earn less than Rp 3 million a month,' he told the Post.
The municipality's Maritime Affairs, Agriculture and Food Security Agency head Renova Ida Siahaan said recently that the area of rice fields in West Jakarta had shrunk to 141 hectares this year from 250 hectares in 2013.
She noted that the paddy farmland only existed in three subdistricts, namely Semanan, Pegadungan and Kalideres.
'The decline is inevitable as property developers are using the land to construct new buildings as it is actually already owned by them,' she said as quoted by beritajakarta.com. (rbk)
