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.