Taiyuan, Shanxi Province

Well, its my third blog post of the morning and if I can get it finished, I'll be caught up.  We left Chengdu Thursday evening bound for Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province.  We landed at around 8:30 pm and it was 9:30 or so before I made it to my hotel room.  The city looked less developed than many I have seen along the way.  Not a bad city by any means, the buildings just looked a little older and everything wasn't as modern.  What struck me though was the pollution here.  Now many people had warned me about Beijing.  Maybe its the time of year, but I didn't have much of an issue with the air in Beijing.  Here, with the windows open, it hurts the eyes.  It makes them slowly water just a little and has a mild sting.  Like you are chopping up one small onion.  Shanxi is situated close to the center of China, and it is said, that if you want to understand the 5,000 history of China, you should start here.  Much of what I have seen though are "normal" Chinese villages and cities with little time to explore here.  It was heavily involved in the Second Sino-Japanese War with much of it being occupied by Japan after the battle of Taiyuan in 1937.  Following that war it was a major center for the People's Liberation Army during the Chinese Civil War which had begun again in earnest after the end of World War II.

The corn harvest out drying on the front porch.
No grain dryers here, you just spread it out on the ground.

 Friday morning began with a pickup at the hotel around 7:30 and a 3 hour drive south to Changzhi. Changzhi Province is corn country here.  75% of the farmland here is corn - it gets cold in the winter (-5 degrees fahrenheit is normal) and they get just 20 inches of rain a year, virtually none of it in the summer.  The farms are still small, just one mu.  Now I've gotten some varying information as to how big a mu is, so I decided to finally go and look it up myself.  Not many places have this information, and its pretty tough to find.  But what I have been able to find is that it is just a little over 7,000 sq. feet. or just over 6 mu per acre.  So the farms are even smaller than I thought.  Most farms here are 1-2 mu, with the vast majority being just 1 mu.  The drive south was impressive.  Here a few photos taken on the way.  I apologize for the blurriness, but that is what happens when you are going 120 kph down the highway trying to take pictures with an iphone.

See what appears to be short sections of stone walls on the hill in the foreground?  Those are just that.  Small curved stone walls making half circles about 3-4 feet in diameter.  In each one is a single tree.  There isn't enough soil to just plant the tree on the hillside, so they have build tens of thousands of these tiny curved stone walls on the hills and planted trees in them.  But there were also an incredible number of trees planted.  As I've said, China is paying far more attention to the environment than we hear about.  2000 years ago the effects of deforestation were already affecting China, and from 1950's through the 1980's it was devastating.  Much of this area had no older trees to speak of.  It looks as if just 10 years ago there would not have been a tree in sight.  Now many of the hillsides that were terraced for farming, are now planted with trees.    While there is much debate about the success of the program based on planting mono cultures of trees, and non native species, one things is clear from driving around china - you see the results of their reforestation efforts.  For the first decade of this millennium, China has forested eleven and a half thousand square miles of trees - every year.  That is more than the state of Massachusetts every single year!!!  When the government wants something done here they do it.  In 1978 the communist party passed a resolution declaring that it was the duty of every Chinese person over the age of 11 to plant at least 3 Poplar, Eucalyptus, Larch or other saplings every year.  Ordinary citizens have planted some 56 billion trees across China in the last decade, according to government statistics. In 2009 alone, China planted 14 million acres of forest - that's the size of West Virginia.  China plants two and a half times as many trees every year than the rest of the world combined.

This is a very mountainous area.  The interesting thing is that every hill, every mountain has been terraced.  We've all heard of the rice terraces, they are pretty and green and picturesque so they get photographed a lot, and thus we know of them. But every hill is terraced for whatever crops can be grown.  Here it is corn.  20 plants seemed to be the minimum.  If you could fit 20 corn stalks, it was planted.  Many of the small plateaus are only reachable on foot.  I asked how many of the farms had their own, or shared equipment, something that is growing in popularity across China.  I was told only about half, the rest simply cannot reach their fields with anything beyond a hoe or a 50 lb bag of fertilizer, or seed.  getting the crop out is the same - put the bag on your shoulders and hike down the hillside.

One of the the reasons for coming to this area was to see two technologies they are utilizing.   One is in the fields for corn production.  If they leave the corn stubble in place, it will blow away during the winter.  They do not have the machinery to harrow it in.  Instead they have taken to chopping the stalk in 6-12 inch sections, folding over the bottom half of the plant, and putting a little dirt from between the rows on top.  In this way the dirt holds down the stalks, helps break them down, and the stubble cover greatly reduces the evaporation in those bands.  The spacing is about 2 feet of stubble, 2 feet of bare ground.  Next spring the corn will be planted on each side of the stubble in the bare dirt.  The plant will pull the moisture from under the stubble, and also allow the rows to be staggered each year.  The row of heavy stubble also means the farmer only has to hoe in between every other row, the stubble keeps the weeds down in the rest.  And yes, this is all done with a hoe and shovel.

The other technology was a very interesting type of greenhouse utilizing combined fertilizer and irrigation techniques.  Each Greenhouse is roughly 9,700 square feet and costs just $3,200 US to build.  It has a natural dirt floor and is oriented east to west with the brick wall on the right being the north. The brick wall is a full three feet thick.  It is faced with a single layer of brick, and behind that is an earthen berm.  This serves two purposes, one very little sunlight enters through that side, and it is far more durable than the plastic.  More importantly though, it is a massive heat sink.  There is no heating in these structures, and the plastic sheeting on the south face is just one layer or perhaps 3 or 4 mm clear plastic.  All day during the winter the low sun shines on the wall and heats the brick, and the dirt behind it.  As the temperature drops at night, the heat migrates out of the wall, heating the greenhouse.

The trusses are a small gauge channel
stock secured with bolts.

The end walls are brick as well, with a small end house on one side.  They feature a single layer of brick on the outside, a layer of 4" Styrofoam insulation faced with a layer of skimcoat cement with fiberglass pieces in to to help hold it together.  The bottom and top 2 feet of plastic along the south face wrap around a rod to provide passive ventilation when it is warm enough.  These areas however are covered with an incredibly fine screen to keeps pests out.  This one didn't have it, but the others had large yellow sticky traps suspended form the ceiling to catch any insects that did get it.

Every four houses has a pump in a small manhole outside where they all meet.  In each house there is a 30 or so gallon barrel filled with liquid fertilizer, a hose that goes down into that barrel, and a simple venturi system is set up to suck fertilizer out of the barrel when the irrigation is happening.  Each set of two rows of plants has a VERY thin layer of plastic over it with small holes torn in it for the plant, and between the pair of rows and the next is a shallow (4") ditch.  Drip irrigation is used under the plastic that covers each pair of rows of plants, keeping the moisture in the ground and not in the air.

Notice the stairs on the side, and the short ventilation section rolled around
the pipe.

It gets cold here, and these greenhouses are built for year round operation.  With just a single layer of plastic there is virtually no insulation from that.  On the outside there are a series of overlapping 8 foot wide blankets that are rolled on a pipe.  In the center of the pipe is a motor fixed to a pole with a hinge in the middle.  Turn a switch and the blankets all roll down.  Turn it the other way, and they all roll up.  Notice the one in the back with the blankets all the way down.  At first glance this system seemed very rudimentary   After really spending time with it however it seemed ingenious.  Simple, cheap, reduces water (the limiting factor here for growing) by 2/3, reduces insect, fungus and bacteria pressure and extends a growing season from around 180 days to 365 without the need for heating.  This was a demonstration facility (although they had 120 of these greenhouses and where building 200 more) so they were all built with good materials.  The farmers in the area build them smaller (each of these were 30% larger than their farms) and many used 100% dirt (no brick) in the north, east and west walls; used blankets made from woven corn and rice stalks; and used cheaper plastic on the south wall (1.5-2 mm).  Most farmers build them for around 8,000 RMB or 1,280 US$ (half what the demonstration center builds them for).

It was a long day (6 hours of driving, 3 hours of meals (you read my last post on meals here right?), and about 2.5 hours of learning of the technologies, but it was well worth it.