This weekend I traveled into Baoshan for a mandatory professional development conference. The trip takes at least 4 hours by bus, with an annoying transfer--all the way across town--in Tengchong, but luckily it's a pretty drive through mountains and farmland.
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| Corn fields. |
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| It seems to be the middle of the rice harvest, so many of the fields have been and there are small piles burning. |
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| Unharvested rice fields. They turn golden just before harvest time. |
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It's uncommon to find large rectangular fields here.
Mostly they are terraced and irregularly shaped, filling the landscape like a mosaic. |
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This is not a typical sight. It's one of the few real tractors I've seen in China. In this area, at least, most farming is
still done by manual labor only. The egrets, however, are pretty common throughout the fields. |
For those interested, here is a recent New York Times article describing the plight of farming in rural China:
Once a Symbol of Power, Farming Now an Economic Drag in China.
I like the Chinese different sized farms way more than the huge-collective-farms-now-individual-farms here in TJ. All the beautiful and different farms that they talk about in all the historical literature are long gone. I'm glad that the iron rice bowl didn't change farming in China as much
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