Corn Drying on Roads: The Root Cause Is the Lack of Public Drying Grounds

The National Day Golden Week is supposed to be a time for leisure and entertainment, but Aunt Gao of Wen County, Henan, is recovering from injuries at home because of a traffic accident. The reason is that when Aunt Gao was riding her bicycle home from town, she fell into a ditch by the roadside while passing an oncoming car. On closer examination, it turned out that nearly half the width of the township road she had to take home from town had been occupied by farmers "drying corn."

There is no doubt that drying grain on the road poses a huge safety hazard. It not only affects the smooth flow of road traffic but also easily causes car accidents. On the other hand, from a legal perspective, farmers drying grain on roads is an illegal act, and once it causes a traffic accident, they need to bear corresponding legal liability such as civil compensation, so the loss outweighs the gain.

In response to farmers drying grain on roads, transportation and other departments in various places have taken many measures and achieved certain results, but they have not fundamentally eliminated the problem. Whenever the harvest season arrives, the phenomenon of grain "seizing" the road exists in almost every place. On the surface, the reason farmers choose to dry grain on roads is mainly that it can quickly dry the grain, improve efficiency, and save costs in the grain-drying process. Fundamentally, however, it is the abandonment of rural grain-drying grounds that leaves farmers without suitable places to dry grain, forcing them to dry it on roads.

In the past, almost every administrative village and village group had its own grain-drying ground, for villagers to dry grain in a centralized way during the harvest season. Today, the grain-drying grounds of the vast majority of villages have either been abandoned, sold off as collective land, built over with houses, or reclaimed as farmland. It is only because rural areas no longer have public grain-drying grounds that the nationwide phenomenon of corn "seizing" the road and wheat "seizing" the road has emerged.

To effectively eliminate the phenomenon of corn "seizing" the road and ensure road traffic safety, the key is not to directly prohibit farmers from drying grain on roads, but to make up for historical debts, rebuild rural public grain-drying grounds, or add some drying facilities, so that farmers no longer have to worry about drying grain.