Sichuan, a Province of Leisure, part 1.

The swan lake at the Panda Base featured
primarily black swans, with a few white
ones thrown in.  Very cool looking
birds with bright red eyes, beaks, and feet.

Tuesday night I boarded a plane for Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province.  Three things of note, all of which I have confirmed while here - It's the "home of the Giant Panda"; they have great food here that, while spicy, isn't overpoweringly so; and it deserves it's nickname, the "Leisure Province".

I had no meetings scheduled for the morning, so I took the opportunity to visit the Chengdu Panda Base.  Peggy came along to help out, and it turns out we made a very good team - I can't read a word of Chinese, and she can't navigate from a map to save her life.  But between the two of us we were able to find our way through the maze of gardens, walkways, and enclosures and back out in plenty of time for our lunch meeting with the staff from the Sichuan Department of Agriculture.  it was an impressive facility with plenty to see, pictures are easier than words here, so:

This was an enclosure of "Sub-Adult" giant pandas.
Interesting note, Giant Pandas are not actualy panda's at all.
They are bears.  I knew they were bears, but I just figured
pandas where a colloquial term for some types of bears.
Nope, bears are bears and pandas are pandas.
But the real pandas come later.

It's difficult to get a picture of a Panda
when it isn't doing one of two things -
eating or sleeping.

Hey look, he's not sleeping.  about two minutes later his eyes
were closed and his tongue was hanging out though. That
picture on the right is the same Panda.

baby Panda's are adorable, its as simple as that.

Here is an actual panda, a red panda.  it's body is the size of a
large raccoon, but it's tail is as long as it's body.  They move
more like a cross between a cat and a raccoon.

Another Giant Panda.  Perhaps he
partied a little too hard last
night?  He looked like he was trying
out being a bearskin rug.  His only
movements for 5 minutes were
his back going up and down as he
breathed.

Hey look, it's a panda on the move, where is it going?  

Oh wait, it's just going to sleep. 

Next stop, lunch with folks from the Department of Agriculture. I sent an e-mail to my Eisenhower Fellowships Foundation coordinator with a half joking "suggestion" - any fellow sent to China for more than ten days should get a free membership to the gym for 6 months on return to the US.  It's going to take that long to work off the food here.  it's not "unhealthy".  It is just that virtually every lunch and dinner I have had for the last week has been around a giant table with 12-15 guests and 20-30 entrees.  Also, there is rice wine, and everyone wants to have their own toast to the guest of honor.  I've mastered the chopsticks and dining Chinese style, but it is a little challenging.

We went to the Department and had a good briefing and discussion.  Sichuan Province has roughly 3 million acres of farmland, and 9 million people.  What struck me the most from the meeting was the commitment that the governments in China - central, provincial and village, make to its farms and farmland.  While the villages and cities own the land, they charge no rent, and the farmers using them have a tenure to the parcel, as long as they wish to farm it.  But here are two startling figures that are possible under this type of system and government:

• With the threat of development reducing the amount of farmland available for food production, the government, with the stroke of a pen, has preserved 80% of it in perpetuity.  While there is a lot of reorganizing happening in rural communities - new villages being built (the "new countryside"), old small homes being torn down, and farmland being reterraced and made more efficient and productive, 80% of the farmland today can never be developed, and these acres aren't just set as targets, the individual acres have been designated and set aside.
• In the last 5 years the government has spend 13 billion yuan on physical improvements on 9 million mu of farmland in Sichuan Province.  These aren't new village centers, or new roads to get to rural areas, these are things like lining irrigation ponds, installing aeration systems in aquaculture ponds, installing central irrigation systems with integrated fertilizer application, new drainage ditches and tiling in the fields, greenhouses, etc  . . .  That is roughly $577 USD per acre.  For an average size farm in the US, that would compare to an investment by the US government of $50,000 per farm per year.  And this doesn't include incredible rural developmental  soil testing services, technical services, etc . . .

The input, straw.

After the briefing we jumped in vehicles for a ride out to a medium size biogas facility.  In brief, the facility works as follows – farmers bring straw to the facility.  Each day (always in the morning when its cooler)  1-1.3 tons of straw is ground up into a powder, mixed with liquid effluent from the digester and is pumped into a fermentation tank.  In the tank there is a essentially a shower type system that keeps the liquid moving and the fermentation process happening.  They produce roughly 500 cu meters of biogas each day, running it through a desulferer and dewatering system.  They use 100 cu meters of the output to run the heater for the fermentation system, and the rest is stored in a tank.  They pipe the product to a village about 1 kilometer away. 

The straw shredder, 1 ton of straw is loaded by wheelbarrow
and shovel each day.

I’m not sure about any air emissions (there is no combustion in the system except in the heater) but the only effluent is what is taken out each day to make room for the income 1 ton of straw.  This is run through a screw press to separate the liquid from solid.  The solids are provided to the farmers who provided the straw, it is after all just straw.  The (dirty) water is simply put into a tank and used to liquefy the incoming batch of straw powder going into the fermenter.  The entire facility takes 1 person to run.

The straw powder that is produced by the shredder

 Prior to the system being installed the villagers (farmers) used either wood or natural gas in bottles for cooking.  Now they each have a smart card meter in the home.  They walk down the road to the facility whenever their account runs low, get a new card for anywhere from 25-100 cubic meters at a time (at a price of about 1.5 yuan/cu meter) go back to the house, slide it into the meter, and off they go. The average household uses 1 cu meter a day.  Farmers who collect their straw, transport it to the facility, and stack it are paid roughly 350 yuan a ton (the average production from 1 mu) in the form of biogas credits.  At an average use of 1 cu meter per day, that means that with the waste product from their farm, each farmer can provide all the biogas they need for the year.

This is what it looks like when the water is added,
and the mixer that stirs it up for pumping into the fermenter.

We also went to the village center itself.  It was very curious, a circular road that wrapped around a large, well landscaped pond with houses around the outside.  Each house had a large roll up door in the front (it’s pretty moderate temperature here year round) along with a “normal’ door.  Inside there was  a 12X12 room on the left (with the roll up door) and a hallway.  Down the hallway were three bedrooms (maybe 8X12 each) and a courtyard in the back of roughly 5X15.  Behind the courtyard was a wide, but shallow building (roughly 5X15) with  bathroom on the left taking up ¼ of the space and a kitchen on the right taking up the other ¾.

The fermenting tank (left) and
biogas holding tank (right)

The effluent being seperated - solids in the wheelbarrow,
liquid into a small tank to use the next day for watering
the straw powder for injecting into the fermenter.

This is the end product, a large, hot blue flame.

While most of the gas is used for cooking
and hot water, it can also be used
for lighting.

A small wall mounted hot water heater powered by
biogas.

The smart meter.  The smart card goes in the bottom
and the meter shuts off when the credits run out.

The "New Countryside".  Before moving here the farmers lived from 1-10
kilometers away in very poor ramshackle shed type houses, often made with
corrugated metal. Now they live side by side in this village center with
electricity, water, biogas, indoor toilets, a community center, and landscaping.
While every resident I spoke to opened their home to show us, and were happy
and proud, they all said no, they had no choice in moving here, they were
told they had to, and their old homes were removed.  But they all seemed to
have no problem with that.  Its just the Chinese way.

The cars were ours.  But the cat was local.  Notice all the
landscaping.  It was all well cared for, and frankly appeared
to be a nice place to live.  Most of the residents were gathered
around majong tables indoor and out playing them and
drinking tee at 3:00.  When I asked about that,
they said it was normal, after all this, is
Sichuan, the leisure province.

Wuhan

On the afternoon of Sunday the 28th I flew from Guangzhou to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province.  First on the agenda for Hubei was a dinner on Sunday night with many of the staff from the local soil and fertilizer station, and the Provincial Agricultural Demonstration Center.

A picture of the demonstration center.  Handily, it was printed on the side of the tissue boxes at the conference table.  

We got a reasonable start on Monday morning, about 8:30, and drove a while until we entered a small little oasis.  I describe it like this, because most of the farms that we have seen are tiny plots of land between buildings, roads, ponds (especially in Hubei), houses or on hillsides.  They are not rare, in fact they are the most common land feature, they are just mostly small groups of 5-20 1/4 acre to 1 acre fields in a patchwork around and between these other land features.  We entered the facility and after winding our way down several very narrow roads, and across some bridges, we went into the central building and into the conference room.  This facility hosts over 20,000 visitors a year from around the world, and around the Province (but is geared mostly to farmers from around the province to come and learn different farming techniques, and to hear about different crops.

Like many of the farm areas here, all the roads between
fields and all the ditches, and most of the dikes are concrete.

This is the second crop of rice of
the season.

A field soon to be planted like the
one on the right.  Notice the tree
plantings along the main water ditches
on the left.

Potatoes grown not from seed potatoes, but from tissue
culture in a lab to assure that they are bacteria and
virus free.

Papaya trees.  Note the long hills on
which the trees are planted, as I
said, it rains a lot here.  Also note
the white clover that is planted across
the entire ground. They mulch it into the soil
twice a year, and it fixes nitrogen and
prevents many weeds year round.

A new variety of disease resistant cotton.  I'll show you
more cotton later - they use it as a default crop, if
and area is too small for something else, just
plant a cotton plant or two.

This demonstration farm is organic.
What you see here is the primary
form of pest control.  Two lights
above two trays of soapy water,
powered by a solar panel.

They grow 13 different kinds of fruits, countless vegetables, rice, many different aquatic species, hogs.  All together they have more than 140 different species of plants they are raising.  Note that this is not an experimental farm.  It acts instead more for an extension purpose - it takes the research done, applies that to normal, real world farming conditions, and places it on display for all to see.  It is run by the local Provincial (state) government and takes about 30 farmers to run.  I will add that like much of China, it is also very well manicured with roses planted along the roadways, small ornamental islands among the aquaculture ponds, and flowers planted throughout.  As you can see from the pictures that follow, it was raining.  But that didn't stop us from a great tour of the facility.  And one other important note - the entire farm is organic.  Its not the same as our organic, but very similar standards, with a strict three year process that farmers must go through to be allowed to use the organic label.

This is lettuce.  Notice the ditches - it rains a lot here.

This facility helped to illustrate for me that while china has a 5,000 year old history of agriculture, and while there are many traditional methods that they use, China is putting its money into advancing all sectors of their economy.  And agriculture isn't just a sector of their economy.  Its not like construction or electronic manufacturing - for them it is a matter of National Security.  They have 1.3 billion people to feed, and they need every improvement they can get to that, not just with the most food they can get, but with a variety that knows no bounds, and with an ever increasing focus on food safety that we hear very little about in the US (we hear the problems, but just like what happens in the US, the Chinese government is responding to those problems and making changes.)

Next was a short cultural side trip to the Yellow Crane Tower.  I linked the wikipedia entry, and here are some pictures, with captions.

many poets visited this tower and the countless towers that
preceded it, destroyed by fire and war.  Most wrote poems
to help to share their impressions, three famous poets are:
Li Bai, perhaps China's most famous poet; Cui Hoa, he
wrote his a little while ago back in the 700's; and finally
someone just as famous, although maybe not for his
poetry (but i have to admit, it does seem pretty good)
Chairman Mao Zedong.

The Yellow Crane Tower

My favorite place at the tower, but down near the start.
The wings (the end bits on the roofs) of the tower are supposed
to represent a goose taking flight.  This is the goose lake.

Another tower in the distance, from the top of the Yellow
Crane Tower.

Tuesday we started around 7:30 and drove for a while out into the countryside to visit a farming area.  One striking thing about China, most every place I have been, is the landscaping.  I chose this picture to the right for a reason.  It is decidedly not one of China's "pretty" roads, of which there are many.  In fact it was a pretty bad road, in a more dilapidated part of the drive.  But look at the island in the road, and the trees on the far side of the road.  Everything here is landscaped.  The cities and villages have more landscaping than almost any place I have been in the United States.  This is the side of China we don't hear about.  Yes, the air is often smoggy (although it often actually foggy or a combination of both) and some parts are run down, and even just plain ol' dirty, but there are plantings that are maintained and well kept on every major road anywhere.  Landscaping in every median and island, and 50-100 feet out on both sides of the road everywhere.  I think they have more landscaping in 100 miles of roadway than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has on every highway we have, combined.  China is making a serious effort to clean things up, and a major part of that, both visually and in the air, is the landscaping.

Add caption

On the way there, we passed many, many villages and fields.  Its amazing to see how over the years, every little bit of land has been utilized for farming.  I'll be frank, when you have 260 million farmers, farming very small pieces of land, it isn't hard.  The village controls the land, and assigns the farmer a piece of land.  The farmer then has tenure on that land, it is theirs as long as they want to farm it.  But they don't own it.  It is not an asset they can sell (although they can rent it out to another farmer.)  They cannot pass it on to their children (although that isn't so much a problem as the family gets around 1 mu (2 acres) per person, kids included, and that means the kids have their own land to use if they wish to farm it.  

But if the kids move away, or the family wishes to leave, they can't just sell the land or rent it out, living in the village is what gives you the right to your own piece of land.  If all there is in the village is a small piece of land, that is what you get.  

Sorry for the graininess, we were moving fast.  That grey
on the bottom right is the concrete road.  Those plants
are rapeseed planted in the two foot wide strip
between the concrete roadway and the ditch in the
rice field.

This is one of the major
waterways through this large patch
of fields.  Notice the landscaping
(I think arbrovite) on the sides, and
the cotton planted between them.

Very cool small rice combine.  It is two ladies who are
professional harvesters.  They own the harvester and
do contract work for other farmers.  One drives, and one
sits on the side and fills the bags with rice as it is harvested.

We had a great conversation between these
two farmers.  See below.

I finally had a chance to spend some time speaking with some farmers here in China.  It was interesting to say the least.  This man is "retired" which only means that he is past 60 so he gets a retirement benefit from the government.  It doesn't mean he doesn't work though.  His retirement is 55 yuan a month (right now 6.25 yuan = 1 USD, so that works out to about $8.80 US a month).  He still farms though on his 1 mu (about 2 acres.)  He grows two crops of rice each year, this being a climate that allows for double cropping of wheat.  10 years ago it would take he and his wife 2 months of hard work to harvest one crop and plant the next (doing that twice a year.)  The rest of the year he might work 10 hours a week in the field.  Now, with machinery he still only has his two acres, but it take just him one week of work, mostly from a tractor, to harvest and plant the next crop.  He bought the machinery, both plow and harvester for around 120,000 yuan combined and rents them out for 300 yuan/mu for the harvester and around 60 yuan/mu for the plow.  The equipment costs more than that, but for anyone who wants to buy it, the government pays 1/3 of the price for any agricultural equipment they buy.  Pretty eye opening stuff.  

I'm not sure what she had in those bags, but notice that she
has one up front across the center bar of the bike as well.

On the way back I got two pictures that I think exhibit pretty well something that I am constantly amazed by here.  These people can get more "stuff" on a bike (motor or pedal) than I think I can get in the back of our medium sized SUV!

You can't see them all, but this guy, parked at a red light
has three more boxes down the other side of the bike
and that's another between his legs.  Plus the front
basket was stuffed full of stuff.

All right folks, That's all for now. The day ended with a flight to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province teaser for next time - Giant Pandas aren't really Panda's, they are bear, but red pandas, well they are actually pandas.  They are both darn cute though.