Elysium

Lay of the Land

Posted by snow under china

In the countrysides of China, the people are organized into small farming towns, each about a half an hour’s walk appart. These are a cluster of maybe a hundred homes that farm the nearby fields. Each family uses about 8 mu of land, roughly 5336 square meters or 1.32 acres. Back in my father’s generation, much of these fields were farmed completely organically: weeds and insects were removed by human labor, fertilizer was either the remains of the last harvest or manure and other composted wastes. Nowadays, it’s a completely industrialized process with small scale tractors, herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers and such. This change, according to my father has brought about an over 4 fold increase in yields, at the expense of sustainability. Much of China’s modern destruction of farmlands for cities relies heavily on the bigger yields that the remaining farmlands can produce.

The types of crops varies depending on region. The wetter South is known more for exotic fruits (like lychee) and rice (i’m not so familiar with Southern agriculture) while the dryer North grows a lot of corn, wheat, millet, cotton, yams and a plethora of vegetables. Most of my grandfathers fields grows two cycles of crops: wheat in the late fall spanning into early summer (around early June), corn after that into late summer. Though in some areas, people grow three crops a year. For us, wheat is grown in late fall and it has time to sprout before the snow sets in. From what i understand, the sprouts can’t be too large or they’ll freeze to death over the winter, but having theses small sprouts makes the crops ripen faster the next year. Before the wheat is even harvested, corn is planted into the fields. When the wheat is cut, 2/3s of the stalk is left in the field because corn is about that high and removing all the stalk will damage the corn. The stalks are left in the field as fertilizer and are flipped under the ground (i believe) after the corn is harvested.

There are some communal plots as well where some people grow a little bit of vegetables like beans or cucumbers. My uncle assures me that nobody bothers your plots, though this being China, i had my reservations about the system.

The image is the roofs of a Chinese village. The pointy house in the foreground is built of ceramic tiles while the rest are of concrete. Ceramic tiles is the traditional method, it’s more expensive, but is much cooler in the summer and doesn’t leak.