Why Do Farmers Leave the Land? An Analysis of the Reasons

Farmers are people who work the land; the land cannot move, and the crops will not move either, so it is as if farmers are half-planted in the soil, bound to the land and unable to move. In traditional society, farmers could not leave the land, born there and raised there; in the era of the planned system, farmers were artificially bound to the land and could not move. After the reform and opening up, as restrictions on the movement of the rural population were relaxed, farmers became more and more “restless”, and huge numbers of them “escaped” the countryside through various channels, such as the phenomenon of thousands upon thousands crowding across the “single-plank bridge” formed by pursuing higher education, and the “wave of migrant workers” caused by going to the cities to work…… As the government recognized the status of migrant workers——“a part of the industrial workforce”——escaping the countryside and flooding into the towns and cities became fashionable. In China, two social phenomena have been the most worrisome in recent years: one is the social mentality brought about by the expansion of university enrollment——“only going to university makes you a talent”, “only going to university brings honor to your face”——which has led to extreme waste of educational resources and a distorted educational structure; the other is the rural population movement after long suppression, in which anyone who does not go out to work is considered a “fool” and “cannot even get a wife”. This has formed a vast army of mobile employment. At the same time, hollow villages have formed in the countryside. Our survey of 20 villages found that the degree of aging in rural areas all reached above 30%, the average age of the labor force engaged in agriculture reached 56, and the oldest was 84.

When we investigated the relationship between farmers and agriculture, we included questions such as: “Are you willing to run an agricultural operation?” The village officials thought there was no need to ask this question, because “as long as there is any other way, no one is willing to run an agricultural operation”. The survey results were indeed so: among the more than 200 people interviewed, not one young person born in the 1980s answered that they were willing to work in agriculture. Under what conditions would they be willing to work in agriculture? The respondents answered, “If agriculture could make me rich, I would be willing to work in agriculture.” Yet agriculture is truly not an occupation that can make a person rich. We analyzed the reasons why people are unwilling to work in agriculture, and the results showed that the main reasons farmers are unwilling to run an agricultural operation include the following three aspects:

1. Low agricultural income

Agriculture is characterized by multiple risks. Agriculture is not like industry; agriculture itself is constrained by geography, climate and season, and different geographical locations have different land resources and differences in soil fertility and barrenness. Climate is an even more highly uncertain factor, with droughts and floods unpredictable, so the riskiness or vulnerability of agriculture itself is one of its important characteristics. A saying farmers often repeat, “Sow the land blindly and you might as well clutch a dead child to your breast”, vividly and helplessly expresses the riskiness of agriculture. This risk comes first from disasters of climate and geographical environment; although geographical determinism has been criticized from many sides, its influence on and constraints upon agriculture are generally acknowledged. The quality of the geographical environment directly determines the level of agricultural output and whether agricultural production can proceed smoothly. In areas with a suitable geographical environment, agricultural production is relatively stable and grain output is high; by contrast, in areas with a harsh geographical environment, agricultural production fluctuates greatly and grain output is low. China is one of the regions in the world where disasters occur most frequently and cause the most serious harm; the reasons for frequent disasters include both climatic factors and physical geographical factors. The south is often threatened by floods and waterlogging, while about half of the land area in the northwest is arid and semi-arid, often affecting spring sowing and the growth of early spring crops. In addition, wind disasters, hail disasters, insect disasters and diseases of animals and plants in local areas can all lead to reduced or total loss of agricultural output.

Linked to the multiple risks of agriculture is the low-income characteristic of traditional agriculture. Traditional agriculture is a small-peasant economy; it participates in the market only partially and is highly self-sufficient, as Chayanov said: “The peasant family is at once a production unit and a consumption unit.” Traditional agriculture is in effect a small-peasant economy in which the mode of production has long remained unchanged, basically sustaining simple reproduction, and stagnating over the long term. This small-peasant economy and small-production mode are the distinctive features of traditional agriculture. This mode of production determines that agricultural income is meager and grows slowly. It is generally believed that the contradiction between people and land is one of the reasons for low agricultural income; population growth means the land can only sustain farmers at the minimum level of survival, and in order to meet their families' needs for food and clothing and obtain the source of food and clothing on which they depend for survival, farmers subjectively have no choice but to bend their backs over the yellow earth and engage in grain production. Farmers' labor motive is not profit but subsistence. Producing more grain is both a national need and the direct purpose of farmers' production. In running agricultural operations, because the degree of commercialization is low, the agricultural production and operation mode based on the individual family has remained unchanged all along; under this mode of operation, the development of grain production has basically undergone no substantive change other than intensive cultivation, that is, constantly increasing inputs in pursuit of more output. As a result, the low-income characteristic of agriculture has not changed either. As the agricultural mode of production changes and shifts from self-sufficiency to market orientation, can farmers then obtain more income? The answer is no. Farmers continually adopt new technology and shift from self-sufficiency to market orientation, but they have not gained real benefits. This inevitably drives the rural labor force to transfer to sectors where higher incomes can be obtained. In our survey we asked many farmers for their views on this issue; below is a survey by Comrade Meng Ling.

Beneficial agricultural policies cannot keep young people. With the implementation of a series of beneficial agricultural policies, today's countryside has undergone tremendous changes: roads have been built right up to people's doorsteps, direct agricultural subsidies, home-appliance subsidies for rural residents and other programs have brought farmers real benefits, and the spread of combine harvesters and rice transplanters has fundamentally improved agricultural production conditions. Yet why is there a gap in the generations of those who farm? Old Li, a farmer in Jinbu Village approaching sixty, used three phrases to explain the reason: “a hard trade, not much money, can't bear to give it up.” He meant that farming is a hard trade, heavy physical labor, and only those accustomed to it and full of feeling for the land can keep at it; farming one mu can earn a thousand or eight hundred, and even then only if the weather is favorable and heaven helps, while when natural disasters strike you cannot even recover your capital; and “can't bear to give it up” means that the older generation now regards the fields as their foundation and cannot bear to let the land lie waste, finding it hard to let go of their feeling for the land. Old Li's words represent farmers born in the 1950s; they lived through the famine years and after decades of hard cultivation have developed an inseparable bond with the land, treating farming as their lifelong occupation and holding fast in the countryside no matter how hard it gets.

But the thinking of young Hu, born in the 1980s, is completely different. He said that since graduating from high school he has gone out to work, and now works at a foreign enterprise with a monthly income of more than 2,000 yuan, and he has never once been to the family's fields. Even during the two busy seasons each year he does not come back to help. He long ago told his parents to transfer their 4 mu of contracted land to others to farm, because working all year round brings no money at all. When asked how many farm tasks he understood, he said frankly that he basically did not understand them, did not want to understand them, and was even less willing to do them.

“Why not let your children take over the farming?” The answer of farmer Old Jia may represent the actual situation of most farmers.

“Now basically every family has only one child, and they either go to university or go out to work; moreover, these young people have never been in the fields, and some do not even know where their family's contracted land is. Expecting them to take over the farming is impossible. Most parents dote on their children and never intended to let them continue as farmers; after graduating from school they simply go to the city to find a job, buy an apartment and settle down, and when they come home they have instead become ‘relatives’, and on the rare visit home they still need their parents to wait on them.” The villagers all say this situation is very common in the countryside.

“Now the government has agricultural subsidies, so why can't it attract young people to come back to farming?”

“The subsidy money is too little compared with working outside, not enough to attract people back to the countryside to farm.”

Farmer Old Liu has two sons, both now working outside and settled in towns and cities; he and his wife are both over sixty, and although neither is in good health, they still farm 7 mu of land. He said, “The sons won't come back to farm. We'll farm as long as we can manage one day at a time, and when the day comes that we can't move, we'll just let it go”.