China's rural groundwater is seriously polluted: is it still drinkable?
Since 2005, as a doctoral supervisor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, I have led group after group of graduate students in ecological agriculture practice in my own hometown, Jiangjiazhuang Village, Bianqiao Town, Pingyi County, Shandong Province, contracting about 40 mu of low-yield farmland and running an ecological farm. We have witnessed many changes in rural China. What left the deepest impression is that during these 10 years of ecological agriculture practice, the pollution problem in rural China has not only failed to improve, but has become increasingly serious. Because production models that violate the laws of nature have been widely adopted, while large amounts of urban waste have entered the countryside, and industries eliminated in developed areas have landed in backward rural areas, many kinds of pollution have appeared in the countryside. The problems reflected in this article are the real situation we discovered through investigation.
Investigation One: The suffocating stench
In July 2015, several provinces in Shandong encountered successive high temperatures, with some cities reaching 40 degrees. Under such high-temperature weather, the stench given off by some chemical plants and livestock farms was suffocating.
At the northwest corner of my ecological farm, an illegal farm appeared two years ago. It is an industrial duck farm, and the ducks can be sent to market just 25 days after hatching from the eggshell and growing up. Upstream from it there is a large-scale duck slaughterhouse. After slaughter, the ducks enter southern cities and are eaten by some uninformed consumers. In economically developed places, in order to transfer pollution, industrial farms and slaughterhouses have been moved to the relatively economically backward Yimeng Mountain area. Ironically, this place happens to be located upstream of a water source area, and the sewage here and the junk food produced here return to their dining tables.
The stench comes from the duck manure at the duck farm. Normally the smell is already very strong, and when high temperatures hit, the concentration of the stench increases several times, reeking to high heaven. Although the government stipulates that livestock and poultry manure must be separated into dry and wet portions and must not be washed away, these unscrupulous duck farms ignore it and still use water to wash it away. This not only seriously pollutes the surrounding rivers, but during the washing process large amounts of caustic soda are also added. Such duck manure not only cannot fertilize the land, but also burns the crops to death.
The reason ducks can be sent to market in 25 days is thanks to the heavy use of feed additives. Various heavy metals, antibiotics, and hormones are added to the feed, making the ducks grow at abnormal speed. Not to mention that such duck meat poses serious quality and safety problems; even the manure poses serious environmental pollution, and farmers who work at duck farms for a long time also face health risks.
Recently Linyi City has been tackling pollution with an iron fist. I hope to take advantage of this momentum to clean up the farms in remote rural areas that seriously violate the laws of nature and seriously pollute the ecological environment, so that the people of Yimeng Mountain can soon have back the green mountains and clear waters they have long missed.
Investigation Two: Groundwater is no longer drinkable
During our rural surveys, we found that more and more farmers are buying water to drink. The earliest discovery of farmers buying water to drink was around the Spring Festival in 2013, and this year villagers found that buying water to drink has become a common phenomenon. More than a dozen villages along both banks of the Jinxian River in the Yimeng Mountains all used to fetch water from the riverbank sand to drink, or each village had a well, and what they drank was shallow groundwater. Now, the river water has long been undrinkable, the well water is also undrinkable, and even the tap water supplied by the town is almost undrinkable.
Families with the means spend money to dig deep-water wells, and well digging has become an industry.
The river water is undrinkable because of riverside industry, especially slaughtering and industrial farming. The river water has already become seriously polluted, becoming water worse than Class V; shallow groundwater is undrinkable because of agricultural pollution. To save trouble and reduce inputs into the land, farmers use large amounts of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and other pesticides, ultimately making the groundwater they rely on for their livelihood undrinkable. Farmers who originally did not have to pay for water have now tasted the bitterness of spending money to buy water to drink——that water has to be bought every day, for every meal.
The water is bought from the mountains. Upstream of the village is Mount Meng. Because Mount Meng has good vegetation cover and little farmland, the water produced there is clean and even has a faint sweetness. However, when I went to investigate a few years ago, I found that the water source there is also facing hidden pollution risks. Because there are more tourists, all kinds of agritainment restaurants are spread across the mountain, and wastewater from the catering industry is discharged directly into the water source.
How much chemical fertilizer and pesticide do farmers apply to the environment? Generally, 300 to 400 jin of chemical fertilizer and 2 to 3 jin of pesticide per mu. Of these chemical substances, only 10% to 30% can be used by crops or protect crops, which means that a large amount of chemical substances are used to pollute, with a pollution rate as high as 70% to 90%. Large amounts of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and other pesticides and plastic film cause soil pollution and a serious decline in soil fertility, and the decline in soil fertility in turn drives the prosperity of the pesticide and chemical fertilizer industry. The government subsidizes chemical fertilizers, pesticides, agricultural film, and so on at the source, so that these chemical substances are very cheap, and even farmers do not feel the pain when using them——for farmers to remove weeds from one mu, the cost of herbicide is only 2.1 yuan!
Investigation Three: The more pests are killed, the more there are
Entering July, farmers in several villages in the survey area, including Shiqiao, Nan'anjing, Bianqiao, Xijingbu, and Huangpu Village in Bianqiao Town, Pingyi County, began to get busy. An outbreak of a stem borer occurred in the farmland, specifically gnawing on the corn cob, that is, the young leaves at the top. After eating them, it bores into the lower part of the plant, making it very difficult to control, and farmers hate it to the bone.
Farmers have to spray pesticides on the fields many times every year. Including using pesticide seed dressing at sowing time, using pesticides four or five times is normal. If fruit trees are grown, the number of sprayings per year can be as high as more than 20 times.
Today's farmland is full of deadly intent. Pests have almost all been baptized by pesticides. The more pesticides are used, the more the pests seem to fight more bravely. In the past more than one hundred years of the human-pest war, the winner in chemical confrontation seems to be the pests rather than humans——there are more and more cancer patients in hospitals, while pests still multiply at double speed.
Under pesticide stress, pests evolve, and this evolution is induced by pesticides. It is said that some pests cannot be killed even if soaked in undiluted pesticide liquid. Such pests have evolved a layer of waxy hairs that isolate liquid. If someone studies the mechanism of pesticide-induced pest evolution, there should be very good scientific discoveries. Farmers do not know the principle behind it, and every year they continue to pour tons of pesticides onto farmland.
Some pest outbreaks are panics artificially created by pesticide merchants and pesticide peddlers. In order to scare farmers, their purpose is to peddle their pesticides. They do not care whether farmers have controlled the pests; what they care about is pesticide sales.
When pests appear in farmland, when only 2 to 3 pests appear per mu, plant protection experts advise farmers to spray pesticides and also recommend which pesticide to use. If they do not spray, what farmers often hear is the following:
Are you not going to spray pesticides? If you do not spray, the crops will all be ruined.
Some government officials have also become mouthpieces for pesticide merchants: “If you do not spray pesticides, yields will decrease by 70%, or even fail completely.”
Now the names of pesticides are becoming stranger and stranger, such as “One Step Kill” and “No Insects for a Month”, full of gnashing hatred for pests and also full of temptation for farmers——they are not afraid you will not come to buy.
Investigation Four: The river has become a stinking ditch
To the east of Jiangjiazhuang Village, Bianqiao Town, Pingyi County, Shandong Province, there is a small river called the Jinxian River, which is the upper reaches of the Yi River. The Yi River is a relatively large river in the Si-Yi-Shu river system of the Huai River basin, entering the sea from Jiangsu. In the era before tap water, villagers in more than a dozen villages along the river relied on this small river for their lives. Both surface water and ground water could be drunk, without needing water treatment. To this day this river is still a water source for Linyi City and cities along the line, but various water treatment measures are needed.
In the past, when the village did not yet have air conditioning, this river was a natural summer resort. In the hot summer, people who had been busy all day used this river to wash away the heat from their bodies. Men bathed in the upper part of the river; women bathed in the lower part, but men had the right to bathe both day and night, while women could only bathe at night.
Villagers have many memories of this small river:
There were many fish in the river. During summer floods, large carp weighing several dozen jin could be caught on the shoals. The fish had escaped from the reservoir upstream. When the current was gentle, some fish could also be seen quietly staying under the shallow water. There was a kind of fish we called “shalipa” (scientific name sand snakehead, a fish of the Channidae family), which could be caught by hand. As for crabs, shrimp, frogs, loaches, and so on in the deep water, there were even more. Children could catch shrimp with a bamboo strainer, and the skillful ones would even weave fishing nets and weave them into the shape of a winnowing basket, tying them to a long pole to catch more fish. Farther along, the small river flowed into a forest so dense that no people could be seen, and timid children did not dare walk into it. In the forest there was a bird called the little yellow finch, with golden feathers, small and agile, very hard for children's slingshots to hit. Once summer came, countless cicadas resounded through the whole forest. The hotter the weather, the more joyfully they sang. At this time, the happiest thing for children was to go stick cicadas as soon as class was over, pick up cicada shells, and catch cicada oxen (that is, golden cicadas; golden cicadas are the larvae of cicadas, and after shedding their shells they become cicadas).
Today, this small river has become seriously foul-smelling. People cannot swim in it, let alone drink from it. The fish and shrimp in the water are gone, and the reed marshes along the river are gone. Every day this river must bear the burden of carrying various pollutants downstream, then passing through cities along the way, and finally flowing to the sea.
According to villagers, the deterioration of the river water began with the felling of the local forest. This process occurred around 1982. First the collective forest was divided, and the diverse local forest was sold off and divided up, and then a uniform crop of poplars was planted. Soon afterward, people discovered an opportunity to get rich——selling sand. Because cities developed rapidly and needed large amounts of sand, the sand of the Jinxian River was dug out layer by layer. The sand here was made into concrete and propped up city after city.
Later, people frantically built all kinds of farms along the river, mostly industrial fast-growth farms raising chickens and ducks, with sewage discharged directly into the Jinxian River. After there were more chickens and ducks, slaughterhouses were then built along the river, and the slaughtering wastewater basically entered the Jinxian River without treatment.
There were also other large and small factories, as well as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and fragments of plastic film discharged from farmland, which also entered the Jinxian River with surface runoff when it rained.
⟧ This once beautiful Jinxian River had already existed in name only as early as 20 years ago. Now in Shandong and even in the entire inland provinces, it is already very difficult to find sand. And heavy metals and other substances in the sediment also require special treatment and restoration, and the cost is expensive.