Today鈥檚 farmers find there鈥檚 little use for the sickle
Print Edition
THE owner of the 200-hectare Fumin Family Farm in Linyi County in east China’s Shandong Province, has a sickle that remains as sharp as it was more than a decade ago.
“It’s not that I have taken great care of it, but it’s just so rarely used these days,” said Wei Dedong.
With a range of harvesting machinery available, Wei said his sickle is only used at the very edges of the field that the machines have missed.
As China wraps up its summer harvest, particularly in wheat belt provinces of Shandong, Henan and Anhui, machines have eased the burden of many farmers.
The timing of the summer harvest is called shuang qiang, or “two rushes,” as farmers rush to harvest to make space for new crops, which must be planted before it is too late.
A common consequence for farmers of the summer harvest was severe back pain from having to bend over to cut the wheat at ground level. An old Chinese idiom describes the agricultural toil as “face to the soil and back to the sky.”
The work was so overwhelming that primary and middle schools in rural northern China often gave students a two-week “wheat leave” to allow them to help with farm work.
“In the beginning, even the most primitive hand-held harvesters were rare in the fields,” said Wang Min, who spent her childhood in Shandong.
Today more than 90 percent of wheat in Wang’s hometown, and across China, is harvested by machines.
“Wheat leave disappeared over a decade ago and has not been heard of since,” she said.
Also gone is the sickle, which, despite being a symbols of communist movements across the world, has been losing its role in Chinese agriculture.
“What used to be a month’s labor is now finished in about 10 days with a combine harvester,” said farm worker Xia Xiaoguo.
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