We were staying in a very nice “home stay” that had rice fields behind it. We had a habit of taking our morning coffee outside to watch the sunrise. (For twenty five cents you could get a boy with a long bamboo pole to keep the monkeys from stealing your food.) We started watching what appeared to be a very old man planting rice in flooded fields. For many days, he spent hours, bent over plugging rice shoots. One morning he was not in the fields and we spotted him at a distance herding a small gaggle of geese to his newly planted rice fields. Geese are grazers and prefer new growth. All day long the geese weeded the rice fields and in the evening the old man reappeared and herded them back to a little shack way out in the rice field.
I have had geese and they will weed a fence line better than any mechanical “Weedeater”.
