China’s small farms are fading
Traditional plots of land are slowly becoming parts of bigger operations, eroding a way of life but enriching local residents and helping more Chinese people move into the modern world. By Michael Schuman
This village doesn’t change quickly. The ebb and flow of the planting and harvesting seasons still govern the lives of its 3,000 residents. Some rise at 3 a.m. to cook homemade tofu, a Shanhui specialty, over a coal-burning stove. Most homes remain topped by traditional Chinese tiled roofs, here crowned by carved dragon’s heads, as is local custom.
Zheng Nanda worked the fields that surround this village in the northern province of Shanxi for more than four decades, often behind a plow pulled by cows. He is now in his early 70s and too old for such arduous labour. His children long ago left for jobs in the city and have no interest in farming.
So Zheng became an unlikely agent of change. He has rented almost all of his small plot to other farmers, who work it using modern equipment. The $500 a year he earns in rental income helps keep him comfortable in his neatly manicured courtyard home.
“I won’t want to join my children in the city,” he said. “There is a Chinese saying that ‘fallen leaves return to the roots’.”
As young people leave for the cities, more farmers like Zheng are leasing their land for others to work. That is a monumental shift for a country where small family farms have dominated the rural landscape for centuries.
Other wealthy countries, like the United States, saw farms grow as the rural population shrank. Only relatively recently has that begun to happen in China. In the 1980s, the government broke up the giant communes favoured by Mao Zedong and redistributed the rights to farm individual plots to households.
Further changes in government policy in the mid-1990s made those land rights secure enough for farmers and others to have the confidence to rent land on a wide scale.
China’s agriculture sector is far from being dominated by big commercial farms, as it is in the United States, but the process has begun.
It may sound tragic, as a traditional way of life gives way to modernisation, much like the disappearance of the small American family farm. But the transformation is good for China and the entire gwlobal economy.
Bigger farms become more efficient. Those farmers can make more money. And more people are free to move to the city, creating even more consumers for Ford cars, Starbucks cappuccinos and Apple iPhones.
“If everybody farmed, then everybody wouldn’t have that much land,” said Zheng Yunshou, a 51-year-old Shanhui farmer. “But if one household out of 10 does all the farming, then they can make enough for themselves, and the other nine can also make enough by working elsewhere.”
Zheng has already accepted that he may be the final farmer in his family. His plot of less than three acres is too small to generate sufficient income, so he spends half his time loading coal and iron ore at a local steel mill to earn extra cash.
His son still lives at home, but he prefers his job operating an excavator at construction sites to toiling at his father’s cornfield. Zheng’s daughter has left for a far-off city, where she “does something with computers.”
“I’m not sad about it,” Zheng added. “The farm will not be sufficient to support my son.”
As these small farmers bow out, Zheng Chenggong, 27, is taking their place. (As in many rural villages in China, residents of Shanhui share a handful of surnames.)
Twenty years ago, his father tilled a small plot of about two acres. Since then, Zheng and his parents have amassed more than 160 acres by renting plots from the local government and other villagers who have given up.
The result is a thriving business cultivating corn and carrots. Zheng invested in planters, pesticide sprayers and other equipment, including a new, shiny red harvester, parked in a lot behind his modest home. Piles of corn are stored in a warehouse next door.
During autumn, he employs over 100 people from about 10 villages to harvest his carrots.
By farming on such scale, Zheng can make money smaller farmers can only dream about — roughly $80,000 a year. Much of it is reinvested in more land and equipment.
“In 10 years’ time, a lot of land will be rented to big farmers like me,” Zheng said.
That opportunity has drawn others. Over the past 10 years, Zhang Mianhuan, 59, has increased the size of his farm 10 times, to more than 30 acres, on which he grows corn and sorghum. On his old, small plot, he pocketed a measly $300 a year — barely enough to get by. Now, he earns about $9,000.
“Farmers think, ‘The more land the better’,” Zhang said. “It means more income.”
In some villages, farms are getting larger and the population is dwindling at an even faster pace than in Shanhui. But that does not necessarily mean China’s village will completely die out.
China’s population is so large that hundreds of millions of people will most likely remain in the countryside even as cities swell. That means many areas of China may not develop the sort of supersize industrial farming common to places like America’s Midwest.
“China’s situation is completely different and cannot follow the US model,” said Li Ping, a senior attorney at Landesa Rural Development Institute, a non-governmental organisation that helps secure land rights for the world’s poor. “Village size will be somewhat shrunk, but the village will still be there.”
The residents of Shanhui think so, too. Though they assume the population will shrink, they remain convinced the village will become wealthier.
“Everything will just get better,” said Zheng Nanda, the retired farmer, a typical sentiment shared by the villagers. “We don’t need to worry about anything.”
Whatever the future holds for Shanhui, many villagers feel little nostalgia for their poorer past.
As the sun sets and the air cools, Wang Yulin, 61, tends to his fresh corn seedlings in a field on Shanhui’s outskirts, as he has done for decades. But with his three children off working in cities, he realizes that one day, he will probably have to give up his farm.
He greets the prospect with a shrug. “You can’t make much money farming.”
‘‘ The more land the better. It means more income. ZHANG MIANHUAN Corn and sorghum farmer