Harvesting wheat in a village on the Loess Plateau. The fine silty soil here was deposited by desert winds over thousands of years, and the silt has been carved into terraces for agriculture. The crop mix here has been shifting away from wheat as farmers make more money growing corn, and the newest trend is a government program to plant the terraces in fruit trees, which did not seem very well looked after. The wheat is primarily harvested by hand, using something like a gasoline-powered disk saw saw on an stick to cut the stalks which are then tied in bundles to dry and before threshing at home for family consumption. Corn is the cash crop, which brings in an average of about $1000. Bees, a few cows, or a job in town is necessary to make short ends meet.
Farming on terraces like this is labor intensive, and farmers are finding them hard to maintain as children migrate to the cities for higher paying jobs. With a very low amount of arable land per capita, China struggles to feed itself.
- Filename
- STNMTZ_20160702_18346.TIF
- Copyright
- ©2016 George Steinmetz
- Image Size
- 4600x3448 / 45.4MB
- www.GeorgeSteinmetz.com
- Contained in galleries
