Professional farmers blur the question of who farms the land; rural production relations quietly change
The emergence of professional farmers has blurred the concept of “who is the farmer”. Some villagers do not farm the land; by transferring land management rights they obtain fixed rent, and at the same time they can also be hired by professional farmers to earn certain labor income. Professional farmers who rent land to cultivate earn the price difference from operating the land, yet they cannot get the farming subsidies issued by the government. The villagers are the nominal owners of the land, and the professional farmers who obtain management rights by renting land have in a certain sense become wage workers; while if professional farmers hire villagers to work for them, then another layer of employment relationship is formed. Rural production relations are undergoing subtle changes.
This change is very obvious in Guangming Village, Nanyang Town, Qidong City, Jiangsu Province. Villagers of Guangming Village once became rich by operating greenhouse vegetables, but this did not stop the villagers' pace of going out. As generation after generation of villagers drained away, batch after batch of outsiders came to rent land to cultivate. The land was not left barren, but the people farming it had changed.
⟦NL> Where have the traditional farmers gone
The rolling Yangtze River brings a large amount of sediment from the upper reaches, which deposits at the wide trumpet-shaped estuary, and year after year gradually forms one sandbar after another. The sandbars keep extending; as sandbars connect with sandbars, and sandbars connect with the mainland, the mainland keeps extending outward, gradually forming vast and fertile sandy land, and Qidong is the youngest piece of this sandy land. When the county was established in 1928, it was named Qidong County with the meaning of “opening our eastern frontier”, and in 1989 the county was abolished and a city was established.
Guangming Village is located in the easternmost part of Nanyang Town, less than 10 km in a straight line from the vast Yellow Sea. The scenery throughout the four seasons changes markedly with the replacement and growth of crops. Around the neat rectangular farmland are dotted villages and roads running horizontally and vertically.
On May 7, sunny, a warm spring breeze brushed over the land that was brewing a bumper harvest; the rapeseed was already very plump, and large areas of wheat were quietly turning yellow. The harvest season has not yet arrived, and large agricultural machinery these days still “lies” in the warehouse “with nothing to do”. Facing the upcoming summer harvest, 52-year-old Cao Yanfei looked weighed down with worry.
“Today I originally wanted to find 3 people to spray pesticide, but after searching for a long time, only one person was willing to come.” The dark-skinned Cao Yanfei said helplessly. The one willing to take this job was a 60-year-old male villager, who in one morning used a motorized sprayer to spray 56 barrels of water, and still had to continue spraying in the afternoon. “He is paid by the barrel, 4 yuan per barrel, and he can earn two or three hundred yuan a day.” Cao Yanfei said that spraying pesticide is to prevent wheat from suffering from fusarium head blight; if no one sprays the water, the wheat is very likely to develop the disease.
Cao Yanfei and 59-year-old Yuan Hongxing are local large-scale farmers; the two jointly farm more than 230 mu of land, of which 100 mu is in Guangming Village. “Spraying pesticide requires labor, growing watermelons requires labor, and picking peas likewise requires labor.” Yuan Hongxing said that when picking peas, they had to hire more than 200 people per day at most, but now people are increasingly hard to find, “there are fewer and fewer farmers, farmers are getting older and older, and relying only on mechanization is not enough either”.
Where have all the farmers who farm the land gone? Bao Tangbing, secretary of the Party general branch of Guangming Village, did some calculations: the whole village has 1,105 households and 2,475 people, and more than 1,000 people are away all year round, nearly half of whom work at construction sites as carpenters, masons, rebar workers, and so on, all doing manual labor. “In recent years, our village has had 17 or 18 children admitted to university every year, and almost none have returned; the word ‘farming’ has no attraction for them at all.”
Lu Guanqiu, the villagers' group leader of Group 18 of Guangming Village, also counted on his fingers for the reporter: “Our group has 98 people in total, and exactly half are away. 13 are in business, 21 work at construction sites, 13 work in enterprises, and 2 do aquaculture by the sea.” As with the whole village, those left in Group 18 are all the elderly, women, and children. Yuan Bing, the former Party secretary of Guangming Village, is 59 this year and is the youngest among the farmers in Group 18. “After 10 years, how many people will still farm the land? By then I estimate I will no longer be able to farm either.” Yuan Bing said.
Will the farmers who went out to work come back? “Those working at construction sites will definitely come back after turning 60, because the construction sites will no longer hire them. After returning they will definitely farm the land, but only ‘baixiangxiang’ casually for leisure, and will not use it as a means of making a living.” Yuan Bing said that those villagers who have bought houses in the town or the city will definitely not come back to farm the land.
Lu Guanqiu again counted on his fingers: “Our group has 13 people in total who have bought houses in Huilong Town (where the Qidong City government is located), Jinhai Town, and Nanyang Town. Basically, wherever they do business, that is where they put down roots.”