Why is straw burning favored by farmers? An analysis of the reasons

Recently I saw the news article "Mayors Held Accountable Upon Seeing Smoke, Inmates Given Centralized Education: Localities Roll Out Extraordinary Measures to Curb Straw Burning," and I felt quite helpless. The "battle" horn against straw burning has been sounded across various places, yet almost all of it is directed at farmers and grassroots officials. However, attributing smog entirely to straw burning is biased, and treating straw burning as a farmer's "crime" is even more inappropriate!

My hometown is located in the North China Plain, where people suffer deeply from straw burning. Every year during the summer and autumn harvests, whenever evening comes, thick smoke billows everywhere. In severe cases, you cannot see people ten meters away. The mouth, nose, and throat are torn by this smoky air, making breathing difficult, and the eyes sting from the smoke. This happens twice a year, and in some places there is even a third wave, year after year. Whenever this season arrives, the news media deeply detest this act of burning straw, and publicity about the hazards of straw burning is overwhelming. Coupled with widespread attention to air quality issues in recent years, this air-destroying behavior that can instantly choke people has drawn even more fierce public condemnation. To appease public anger, grassroots governments have also put in great effort to rectify the situation. Every summer and autumn harvest season, townships send out all the officials they can spare, guarding the fields every day to prohibit villagers from burning straw. At the same time, village committees are required to notify villagers that straw burning is banned, with severe punishments and fines of such-and-such amounts for violators, and people are organized to guard the fields strictly. In addition, banners are hung along both sides of roads, such as "Returning straw to the field benefits the country and the people" and "Burning straw is shameful, utilizing straw is honorable." But no matter how earnest the publicity, how severe the measures, or how great the show of force, it is always of little use. If burning is not allowed during the day, villagers will gather together at night to set a fire. With high winds and dark skies, fires spread easily and people are hard to catch, while the guards turn a blind eye, since they are all fellow villagers who see each other every day -- no one will offend people over this ban. Moreover, their own straw is waiting to be burned too... Or village officials, once the higher-ups' attention has passed and the villagers have finished harvesting, quietly set a fire and burn everything that needs burning -- including, of course, their own. The town and county authorities can only fret helplessly. Thus, this matter has become a dead cycle: the government emphasizes it every year, the media reports it every year, and the common people never miss burning what they need to burn even once.

Having suffered deeply from the smoke and fire of straw burning, most people probably cannot understand why villagers insist on burning straw. Aren't so-called methods like returning straw to the field and processing it into feed quite good? Aren't the villagers themselves the first to suffer from the air pollution caused by straw burning? In fact, without understanding the background of how straw became a problem, the troubles of returning straw to the field, and the troubles that straw brings to farming, it is hard to understand why villagers would choose this lose-lose method of disposal. I grew up in the countryside since childhood and know well the hardship that forces farmers to burn straw. Today I will speak a fair word for my fellow villagers.

First, straw only became a problem in the past ten to twenty years or so. On closer examination, this is one of the byproducts of agricultural mechanization. Twenty years ago, farmers never used combine harvesters. To harvest wheat, they would bend over with sickles to cut down the ripe wheat, tie it into bundles, then use motor vehicles or ox carts to haul it to the threshing floor and crush it with stone rollers. After the wheat grains fell off, the straw was piled into a stack, and then came winnowing, bagging, drying, and hauling home. This was a very traditional harvest method. Later came wheat threshing machines, but the wheat still had to be harvested and hauled to the yard to be handled. Rice was similar, except that the crushing method did not work; generally a threshing machine had to be set up in the yard to separate the rice grains from the panicles. Corn harvest was relatively easier: you just twisted off the corn cobs, put them in bags, and hauled them home, then cut down the stalks and hauled them home to feed livestock. This harvesting process was very long, generally requiring at least about half a month to finish, and during this time you had to pray for consistently good weather, otherwise the season's grain could very likely rot in the fields or on the threshing floor. Moreover, the process was truly laborious. Just the consecutive days of bending over during harvesting made the whole body ache unbearably, let alone the series of remaining heavy manual labor.

Fifteen years ago, rural areas began using combine harvesters on a large scale to harvest wheat. This mechanized operation allowed villagers to bag clean wheat and haul it home within an hour, saving the half-month or even month of toil and hardship, and reducing the half-month of anxiety about the weather. However, this method created a big problem: wherever the combine harvester passed, aside from the intact wheat grains, the wheat straw was almost all smashed and scattered everywhere. Moreover, this smashed straw was already useless to the vast majority of villagers, and gathering it up and hauling it out of the fields was very laborious, so villagers had no choice but to burn it, and the ashes could also fertilize the land. Ten years ago, corn began large-scale mechanized operation, and the problem remained the same: aside from the corn cobs, after harvest the fields were covered with straw pulverized into powder. Eight years ago, it was rice's turn, with the same problem.

Second, why do villagers dislike "returning straw to the field"? The legendary practice of returning straw to the field is a very environmentally friendly and soil-enriching disposal method, but after trying it, villagers complained a great deal about it, so much so that later not a single household was willing to do it. Where is the problem? The method of returning straw to the field is nothing more than using machines to smash the straw and bury it deep. However, this process requires villagers to spend money, generally several tens of yuan per mu, basically the same price as mechanized plowing, which undoubtedly increases the burden of farming; burning it outright is simpler and more satisfying. But this is not the main issue. The main problem is that if after the summer wheat harvest you want to plant a second season of rice, then even though the smashed straw has been buried deep, when the fields are flooded for transplanting, this straw will float up, forming a thick layer on the water surface, generally several centimeters to over ten centimeters thick, and the straw, having absorbed its fill of water, multiplies in weight. This creates two difficulties for rice planting: first, when transplanting seedlings, if you encounter places where straw has accumulated, it is very difficult to insert the seedlings into the soil, and even if inserted, they easily float up because their roots are shallow, causing large areas of rice to wither and die; second, the floating straw, when blown by wind, drifts back and forth on the water surface, and because it is heavy, it presses down on the carefully transplanted seedlings, preventing them from emerging above the water and seeing sunlight, so they soon rot into mud. After the autumn harvest of rice and corn, winter wheat is to be planted. What happens if straw is returned to the field at this time? Because much of the deeply buried straw does not rot immediately, and it is not evenly buried in the ground, many wheat seeds, after being sown, cannot contact the soil at all or contact very little of it due to the straw barrier, and thus cannot take root and sprout, causing large-scale reduction in wheat yield the following year. If you really want to wait for the straw to rot before sowing, you must wait at least ten days to half a month, and only if there is sufficient moisture in the soil for the straw to rot -- and this ten days to half a month delays the farming season, causing large-scale crop reduction and a large drop in farmers' income.

Furthermore, why has straw become useless to villagers? In fact, in the past, villagers were fairly willing to deal with straw, because straw had four main uses for them: first, storing it to feed livestock; second, using it as fertilizer for the fields the following year after rotting; third, during the slack farming season, using rice straw to make curtains and twist grass rope to increase income; fourth, selling it to nearby paper mills (for papermaking) and plastic greenhouses (for winter insulation), especially rice straw, which depending on the situation could fetch anywhere from several tens to over one hundred yuan per mu. But now these outlets are basically all blocked: first, due to the spread of mechanized production, few villagers raise livestock at home; second, if making grass fertilizer, hauling these things out of the fields requires a great deal of time and energy, and moreover the fertilizing effect of grass fertilizer is far inferior to chemical fertilizer and manure, so villagers generally apply large amounts of chemical fertilizer. If they really want to cultivate lasting fertility, they generally go to chicken farms and pig farms to buy manure, and would never bother with straw; third, straw beaten by combine harvesters is very fragile and short in length, no longer usable for making curtains and twisting grass rope; fourth, in recent years nearby paper mills and plastic greenhouses have had poor business and are not short of raw materials, so they no longer need straw. Under such circumstances, straw has completely become a useless thing, keeping it only adds trouble and harm -- how could villagers not burn it?

Finally, from the above situation we can know that if straw is not handled well, then the villagers' farming income for one or two seasons will be greatly affected. Compared with being smoked and scorched two or three times a year for about half a month each time, they, with their meager incomes, care more about how to eliminate their troubles in the most convenient way. Bad air can be endured for a few days and then it passes, but if grain output drops and income is poor, they will likely be depressed for the entire year. By comparison, burning straw is a choice with no suspense for them.

As for solutions, relying on the government's repeated bans and threats is clearly unreliable, and relying on pie-in-the-sky publicity is completely useless. Wanting farmers to return to the harvest methods of twenty years ago, or to consciously spend money and effort to protect the environment, is even more of a pipe dream. The only truly useful approaches, I think, are two: first, increase investment to develop something that can make straw rot quickly without damaging soil fertility or crops, and at the same time make it affordable for villagers -- this is the best way to achieve straw return to the field. Although there are now things like decomposing agents, first, the straw rotting process is still relatively long and will still delay the farming season, and second, farmers are truly unsure whether it will harm the soil or crops, so they basically do not use it. Second, the government should step forward and vigorously support industries that can consume large amounts of straw, such as papermaking and feed processing using straw as raw material, and raise the purchase price of straw. Only in this way can villagers be motivated to act, collect the scattered and useless straw, and avoid their resorting to a single fire to solve the problem. In the end, it all comes down to the saying people often repeat: problems arising in development must still be solved through development.