Local Agriculture

There were also a lot of things I noticed while gazing out the window of the bus. First, the agriculture around here is completely different from what I’m used to. They do almost everything by hand. I saw people harvesting wheat by hand! I come from one of the most productive wheat growing regions in the US, and it is all mechanized farming. I didn’t see a single combine.

You might be wondering why on earth they were harvesting wheat in May, and that I honestly cannot tell you. My knowledge of wheat is very limited. Maybe I should email Mary and get her to ask her dad.

The plots of land were small and irregularly shaped, making mechanized farming impossible. Every plot was growing something different. I recognized corn, wheat, rice and tobacco, but there was plenty of other stuff. Judging from the important role potatoes play in local cuisine, I’m guessing there were potatoes out there too. There are a lot of local vegetables I do not know by name nor would I necessarily be able to recognize them in a non-cooked form.

I’m not sure if it is possible to mechanize rice cultivation. The rice has to be transplanted, which is a delicate process, and it is hard to imagine designing a machine to do that.

Agriculture here isn’t entirely without tools, to be sure. There were plenty of ox-pulled plows and even a couple of tractors, but the majority of the work was done by hand. I even saw people doing controlled field-burns in these tiny patches all by hand. They were turning over the soil using hoes!

Seeing this left me feeling very conflicted. This area is a huge, flat floodplain. If it was all one field, you could farm it much more efficiently, get much higher crop yields, and reduce the amount of human labor necessary. It would require switching to some kind of mono-culture, and it would mean that all the land would have to be centrally owned and managed. I can think of a lot of reasons why that might not be a good idea. On the other hand, China is importing food. Increasing crop yield may be not be so much of a “good idea” as “absolutely necessary.”

Environmentally speaking, I am not sure whether the kind of farming they do in the Palouse region is better or worse than what they do out here. I really don’t know about the environmental impacts of farming here in China, but I do know about what’s happening in the Palouse. I know that they are losing topsoil every year wind and water erosion. I know that the soil is getting leached as a result of planting the same crop on the same land every year. I know that they use tons of herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and fertilizers every year and that this stuff is getting into our groundwater.

Using heavy machinery, when possible, probably does save time and human labor, but machines don’t come for free. They have to be built somewhere, which takes energy and resources, and human labor of another kind. Also, tractors and combines run on gasoline, and have the same associated problems. Fossil fuels are in increasing demand and decreasing supply, and the exhaust from burning gasoline does pollute the air. Machines are expensive. Gasoline will soon be expensive.

Dylan pointed out that having solar-powered farm equipment made a lot of sense since farm equipment is used outdoors and in sunny areas it would be an easily-accessible source of energy. Farming machines are also not used year-around (generally) and so a group of farmers could invest in one tractor together, or something like that. In the U.S., most farmers don’t own their own combine. They are part of farming co-operatives and they share the combine with other farmers. Combines are extremely expensive, so I understand why I didn’t see any out here, but I still don’t know how you farm without them. I mean, cutting the wheat, I watched them do that, so it’s easy to see how that’s done. But how do you separate the grain from the chaff? Do you just thrash it for a long time? Ugh! That is labor-intensive and I can’t imagine wheat is enough of a cash crop to be worth the bother.

That may explain why I saw so much more tobacco than wheat. People might be growing the wheat purely for their own consumption, while the tobacco is the cash crop that they grow to sell. It would be interesting to learn more about this.