My First Working Experience

by Noorazimah Taharim




On October 21, 1978, I was directed to report to the Agricultural District Office in Tanjong Karang. Upon exiting the taxi that had brought me down from Kuala Lumpur, I was quite amused with what I saw. The office I was to report to was an old, raised wooden building, with its paint job peeling. Goats were prancing around the compound of the office, leaving their droppings everywhere.


In the office, I asked for Encik Zainal Abidin Ahmad, the Agricultural Component Head. I was told that he was in Shah Alam attending a meeting. So I introduced myself as the new Agricultural Officer. I was greeted with a cold stare by one of the two men in the dimly lit office. Apparently, coming to report duty in a short-sleeved blouse and wearing a tight skirt did not go down well with the two men. As I was leaving and walking down the short flight of stairs, I heard a hushed comment from one of them, "Aiya! Pakai skirt!". Another voice echoed, "Modern la tu!" in an almost sarcastic manner.


It took me some time to get over the first encounter with rural etiquette. Growing up in Butterworth and then attending tertiary learning at University Pertanian Malaysia did little to prepare me for the norms of rural living. But I was determined to make life bearable for me and to make my first working experience a pleasant one. Immediately, I made a phone call to my mother to send a few pairs of baju kurung by post.


During the early months, I would go everywhere with Encik Zainal. That included field visits, meeting with farmers and their leaders, meetings with the heads of other related agencies and I would even sit-in during the Northwest Selangor IADP Steering Committee Meetings. When he went for a course for three months to the USA, I was given the authority to represent him in high level meetings in the DOA and the MOA. These exposures had given me the chance to develop the confidence and managerial skills which proved to be invaluable in my later working years.


The Northwest Selangor IADP was a big project encompassing a total of some 100,000 hectares of agricultural land in the districts of Kuala Selangor and Sabak Bernam. About 19,500 farm families were engaged in agricultural production of coconut, cocoa, rice and oil palm. The paddy-growing belt alone spans an area of almost 20,000 hectares. Very early on I was impressed with the very systematic parcelling of the paddy land into 1.2 hectare plots. On the map, the plots look like neat rectangular boxes.


The enormity of the nature of the job did not sink in until a few months later. In 1978, the paddy were primarily double-transplanted. It was very labour intensive activity and, since traditionally, the planters were women, there was a genuine lack of planters. More and more girls were being educated, and gruelling in the paddy fields were not something they looked forward to. Land preparation, transplanting, fertilising and harvesting were mostly done manually for areas outside Sekinchan, the predominantly Chinese area. Farmers in Sekinchan were already trying out the dry seeding method of planting which were less labour intensive.


Outside Sekinchan, the planting seasons were haphazard due to inadequate numbers of pedestrian tractors among the farmers to prepare the land in time for the recommended planting schedules. Unplanted plots were common occurrences especially on peat areas along the main canal. The Sawah Sempadan area was only getting yields of between 1.0 to 1.5 metric tons per hectare. On the average, the rest of the area outside Sekinchan yielded an average of slightly over 2.0 metric tons per hectare. Sekinchan was enjoying harvests of about 3.5 metric tons per hectare.


Unlike the rice fields of Kedah where water buffaloes were a common sight in the paddy fields, the Tanjong Karang Irrigation Scheme area were devoid of the beast. The paddy farmers toiled their land with their own hands, or employed others to do it for them. The number of pedestrian tractors were still small. The frequent cases where pedestrian tractors got bogged down in the soft, inundated soil were making the land preparation a tedious chore for the farmers. The efforts towards implementing programmes for homogeneous planting were fruitless in the face of the physical inadequacies of the fields.












One of the major responsibilities of the DOA was implementing agricultural extension programmes. DOA was to implement the Training and Visit (T&V) System. Among the foremost tasks was to get farm groups organised. Throughout the year 1979 and 1980, all efforts were focused on forming farm groups in the paddy areas. The biweekly visits commenced as soon as the groups were formed. The extension agents would pass out biweekly meeting schedules to farm group members. During the meetings, the extension agents would give lectures and demonstrations according to pre-planned topics.


During the initial implementation of the T&V system, the biweekly meetings went very well. The farmers dutifully attended the meetings. The meetings started with lectures and the farmers would participate in the field demonstrations given. The farmers took the opportunity to voice their concerns and problems during these sessions. The extension agents recorded these to be brought to the DOA biweekly staff training sessions carried out at the agricultural district office.


The biweekly training sessions for the extension agents were looked forward to as a forum to gather the actual problems on the ground. Agricultural Officers (AO) appointed as Subject Matter Specialists (SMO) would sit together with extension agents to iron out the problems through staff training. The following week, the extension agents would go back to the biweekly meetings with farmers bringing possible solutions, and continuing with the scheduled training sessions.


Over the two year period, assessments were made of the T&V system. Feedbacks from the ground were not very encouraging. The number of farmers attending the biweekly meetings were coming to a trickle. There were reports, too, of biweekly meetings being attended only by the Extension agents and the group leader. Several workshops were carried out to ascertain the reasons for the decline in attendance. Interestingly, several shortfalls became apparent.


The lecture topics given during the scheduled biweekly meetings with the farmers were getting to be repetitious. The same topics were given several times over to the same groups of farmers over the two years. The farmers felt they were wasting time at the biweekly meetings. Absence were also influenced by the various social activities of the village, like during the school holidays when weddings took precedence among the villagers.


Around this time, Basri Zakaria came to take over as Agricultural Component Head. He was a believer in working as a team. Staff developmental programmes were given priority, and creativity and enthusiasm were encouraged and given managerial support. New and old staff began to resolve their small differences towards working together and finding solutions to common problems as a team. The staff morale was high and everyone was committed to achieving the target of the IADP.


During the early part of 1981, a workshop among all the DOA staff were carried out to identify the problems faced by them, and subsequently to plan activities for the new year. A decision was taken to modify the T&V system to reflect the actual needs on the ground. The emphasis were given towards developing project-oriented farm groups. Instead of each group having just one leader, a committee was set-up for each farm group to oversee the planning and implementation of agricultural projects. The extension agents were responsible in giving guidance and as the technical advisor.


Some time later, a collective decision was agreed upon that besides infrastructure up-grading, human development programmes should be given priority. The biweekly meetings with farmers were still being carried out, but the activities were directed towards human development of the group committee members. They were given leadership training and assisted with the planning for the progress of their farm groups.


During the early part of the implementation of the modified T&V system, one of the activities chosen was planning for synchronised planting within an irrigation block, abiding to planting schedules set up by the IADP office. For the synchronised planting programme to succeed, many aspects of the agronomic practices had to be considered. The manual labour shortage was already becoming an issue. Some revolutionary change in the paddy planting method has to happen. The new paddy planting method should require less labour.














At around this time, Salehuddin Yahya, the Subject Matter Specialist for paddy was already looking into the direct seeding method. A small experimental plot was carried out in the small piece of land behind the Sungai Burong Agricultural Station to try out this new method. The biweekly training sessions for staff were used to discuss this new technology. It was decided that to implement the direct seeding method, several physical changes have to take place in the fields.


The dry-seeding method practised by the Sekinchan farmers had to be modified. From an idea given out by a farmer to have large seedling plots, the wet-seeding method was borne. This method requires the land to be flat and wet. The seeds had to be germinated before sowing. Then water was to be let into the field slowly.


The paddy fields had to be flat to accommodate efficient water distribution. To make that possible, the fields had to be worked on by big tractors to make the work more efficient. The problem then was that the soil in the paddy fields were continuously inundated with water most of the time. The land did not get to be satisfactorily drained after each harvest. Under those soil conditions, the heavy tractors frequently got bogged down in the fields.


A new technology package for direct-seeding in the wet was in the making. The hum of excitement were evident among the team especially during the biweekly staff training sessions. Feedbacks from field officers were compiled and discussed. Individual observations and experiences in wet-seeding demonstrations on farmers' plots were taken and thoroughly examined.


The wet-seeding method was pursued with enthusiasm among the ground staff. The officers and extension agents put in equal amount of money to rent a half-hectare plot of paddy land in Sungai Burong to carry out our own wet-seeding. The harvest of the paddy gave a RM 57 profit to each participating member. But the most precious benefit was learning the nitty-gritty of the wet-seeding method. This excercise gave a lot of confidence to the officers and extension staff to carry out this method in the designated areas. All the same, it was also followed with some scepticism by some. The first six demonstration plots in Sawah Sempadan failed. So it was back to the drawing board. A post-mortem of the recommendations were carried out. The following season, 23 farmers agreed to carry out the new method. Only 12 plots managed to get harvested, but many lessons got to be learned from the experience.


Then there was no stopping the new planting method. The following season, 200 hectares of farmers land were cultivated using the wet seeding method. The next season it snowballed to 1000 hectares. To me, the wet- seeding method was one revolutionary change to the paddy industry. I was glad to be part of the team who initiated it's beginning. With the new method, new-sprung challenges emerged in the appearance of Echinochloa cruss-gulli weed. There were also more attacks by the infamous brown plant hopper (Nilaparvata lugens), stink bugs (Scotinophora coarctata) and army worms (Spodoptera litura), primarily due to the high density of the direct-seeded paddy and the then, unsynchronised planting in the area. The excitement of the newly emerged challenges gave the team an opportunity to wheather another uncharted technological journey in the appearance of the Integrated Pest Management for paddy.


Although most of the activities mentioned were for paddy, the tree crop areas also offered some very gratifying challenges. There were rehabilitation of coconut and cocoa stands, the acid-sulphate problems in oil palm areas, and the sea water encroachment into tree crop areas around the coastal belts. Inspite of everything, I am glad to say that the ten years I was in Kuala Selangor were the best years of my working life. I have yet to come across such enthusiasm, creativity, commitment, camaraderie and drive among the staff right from the head to the general workers. Till now, ten years after leaving the place, I still hold very warm thoughts of everyone I knew then. Chance meetings with any of them would bring lots of smiles and laughter, especially news updating on friends and farmers, and their families progress.

January 19, 1998

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