Antique rice cultivation in the Cordilleras

For thousands of years the Cordilleras in the Philippines have been carefully cultivated by indigenous people like the Ifugao with a seemingly infinite series of terraced fields that climb thousands of feet in elevation. The agricultural artscape’s original creators used stone and mud walls to carefully carve and construct terraces that could hold flooded pond fields for the cultivation of rice. Fascinatingly, they’ve also established an artisan water supply by harvesting water from mountaintop forests and leading it though all the plots. It is a masterpiece of ancient engineering as it was all made by hand as was (and is) the farming itself. The harvest is not exported, it only feeds the communities which take care of the plots, with an exception of some lowlanders which might be able to rent a plot, paying a small interest fee in money or rice in return.