More Liuqianhe (劉千河鄉)
Families in Liuqianhe grow two staple crops.
There's corn, which is commonly planted in soil collected by sediment dams. Here, however, is another occasional sight: the ecologically unsound practice of planting on mountaintops, where strong winds can most easily carry away loose soil.
Corn is always dried and ground into flour.
We were also just in time for the millet harvest. To separate the grain from the stalk head (and de-husk it), one common method is to thrash a pile of heads with a wooden flail, which we tried our hand at (picture by Charles).
One family had laid millet stalks in a circle shape with the heads overlapping, and used an ox-drawn stone to crush them free.
After that, the millet must be separated from the husks. Traditional winnowing involves dropping or tossing a pile of millet and husks through the air while the wind is blowing, thus separating out the lighter husks which will fly farther before hitting the ground.
The wind being as unreliable and imprecise as it is, we happened upon one family on the roof of their house where they were using a mechanical winnowing device they had just bought the previous day for 200 RMB. Simply rotating a small wheel spins a container from which millet and husks are thrown varying distances by weight to exit from different openings and form neat piles on different sides of the device.
Background: In China, each rural family is allocated a certain amount of land per person (the unit is "mu," or approximately 1/6 of an acre).
Regarding the new anti-desertification policies (at least those with obvious and direct impacts on locals), most everyone told us the same general story: Nearly eight years ago, the government announced its "Grain to Green" program. At the time, each person had about 4-5 mu, all but 2 mu of which was taken back by the government to be planted with either trees or grass (by the local farmers themselves). In return, for each mu of land re-vegetated in this way, a family would receive 140 RMB per year, and an additional 20 RMB for maintaining it.
Most villagers we met think this is a pretty good deal since 1) they are primarily subsistence farmers anyway, because poor infrastructure means that they can't sell much of their surplus crops, and 2) most villages have been entirely depopulated of their young- and middle-aged residents who are heading for cities and towns (most villages are inhabited primarily by sick or older folk), but they still count as part of the family when land is allocated, thus each household generally had far more land than it needed to feed itself in the first place.
Another incentive to go along with the program is that most of the trees planted in this way were intended as cash crops, both apricots and apples in the Liuqianhe area. At the end of eight years, the stipend will fall to about 70 RMB/mu, as farmers should be able to rely more on their now-mature orchards to supplement income. An example of a dryland orchard (the distant trees, half of which have already turned orange, are apricots):
Things haven't quite gone according to plan. The almonds they produce (the apricot flesh apparently doesn't taste good) originally sold for a fair price to buyers from Hunan, but are now subject to falling prices (and undoubtedly at a disadvantage due to the inability of such a small, isolated quantity to compete with sizeable orchards elsewhere). They now complain that as the government prepares to shrink the stipend, no one comes to buy their almonds, which sit in large sacks inside their yaodong.
That afternoon, we got a taste of "multi-grain porridge" (雜糧粥), a mixture of millet, beans, rice, greens, etc. (which except for the rice were all grown locally). It was incredibly tasty, and touted by the farmer who gave us a bite as the "foundation of the Shaanxi working class."
(The next morning we had some in town, which was decidedly not as good, despite city folk claiming it to be better than what you can get in the countryside.)
We also visited several yaodong throughout the day, this one with an internal passageway connecting its two rooms.
You may recall that part of the Grain to Green project is to prohibit farming on land with a slope greater than 25 degrees. The distance between making laws and actually enforcing them was apparent wherever we went. At one point we came across some villagers harvesting potatoes and turnips planted on an eroded slope of 50+ degrees. As Charles put it, "I don't have a protractor on me, but I'd guess that's over 25 degrees... just a guess."
(Yes, he was smoking a pipe as he dug up potatoes and hauled them up the slope.)
They were bagging them on top of the ridge.
Similarly, grazing is prohibited to protect what fragile little natural vegetation there is; i.e., goats, effective anti-environmentalists that they are, must be penned up and fed. It's not that there is a total lack of enforcement, but as one local put it, "you just bribe whoever catches you; if he catches me [points to someone], then he gets rich, if you catch me [points to me], you get rich!" We'll see some extreme examples of this latter uncooperative behavior in a few days (the grazing, not the bribery).
Speaking of corruption, one disgruntled villager who claimed to not be getting stipends comparable to his neighbors traced us a parting message in the dry earth just before we headed back to town for the night: "中央是好，下面官不好" ("the central government is good, the lower officials are bad"), an observation/opinion I've certainly come across more than once in my travels. This particular villager was afraid to say something like this aloud, but apparently scratching it in the transient surface of the Loess Plateau was okay, and perhaps a fitting place for the message. According to his story, much of the stipend from the central government finds its way into the pockets of local officials, with little of it trickling down to him. For a number of reasons I won't go into here, however, I think in this particular case he was either lying, or did not fully understand the situation. Either way, his actions do say something about the state of free speech in China...
