New Farmers on the Road: Seeing the Countryside, Understanding the Distinctiveness of Agricultural Labor
Introduction
A friend of mine is short-handed and asked me to help find someone. He said what he needs is a go-getter with drive, and asked if I could keep an eye out for him.
This friend of mine grows cabbage (cabbage, Brassica oleracea var. capitata), on about 20 jia. He sprays his cabbage with pesticide once every four days, and applies fertilizer once a week. When it comes time for transplanting and harvesting, the demand for manpower is enormous, so he is actually willing to pay a "decent price" for workers, specifically 1,200 yuan per day or 200 yuan per hour, sometimes even higher, and he also provides snacks and cold water. The conditions look pretty good, so why is he still beating the drum and searching everywhere for people?
First, let us understand what my friend means by a "go-getter with drive."
Let us look at transplanting. One fen of land can hold about 3,500 cabbage plants (in central Taiwan). My friend usually uses five fen or one jia as a single planting unit, which means 17,500 to 35,000 cabbage seedlings. The work crew is eight people over seventy years old, a "thousand-year-old brigade." In one afternoon of four hours, at an average temperature above 30 degrees, they can plant 17,500 seedlings. This may be hard to grasp, so to put it concretely: within an area of 5,000 sq m, without resting, each person must plant an average of 2,200 seedlings, and must bend down and work at a rate of 9 seedlings per minute, continuously for four hours without a break.
If you can do it, you are a capable go-getter.
As for spraying, one tank mix has 3 to 4 insecticides (organophosphates, pyrethrins, neonicotinoids, chloride channel blockers) and 1 to 2 fungicides. A team of 3 people, carried by a small truck, works from 6 p.m. to midnight. In terms of efficiency, at least one team can spray two jia; a tougher one can even spray three to four jia. This may not be vivid enough, so to put it concretely, it looks like this: "In the pitch-dark night, crawling with insects and snakes, the evening wind that kicks up scatters the chemicals everywhere, and amid the distinctive stench of organophosphates, the particular poisoning risk of carbamates, and the bright blue solution of neonicotinoids, wearing headlamps, rain boots, and stuffy masks, they spray 20,000 to 40,000 sq m of cabbage."
If you can do it, congratulations, you count as a go-getter.
Many people keep saying agriculture should be automated. In fact, automation is already widespread in the work-crew systems of major agricultural operations, but it still cannot do without human operation.
Fertilizing is also simple: a handheld fertilizer spreader, weighing about 25 kg when fully loaded and carried on the back. One fen of land takes about three buckets. At a basic pace, one jia must be done in a day; one jia takes about thirty buckets. According to the author's rough estimate, that is roughly carrying a 25 kg fertilizer bucket on your back, under the blazing sun, walking eight kilometers, and that does not even count the back-and-forth trips to replenish and move fertilizer.
If you can do it, congratulations, you count as a go-getter.
Harvesting is also simple. Let us just talk about loading the goods onto the truck. Starting at midnight, with 20 kg cabbage boxes, two people must label and load four hundred boxes onto the truck within three hours.
If you can do it, congratulations, you count as a go-getter.
Driven go-getters and invincible iron men
Overall, the thing agricultural work fears most is delay. It requires short bursts of dense work done quickly.
In rural industries, no matter the crop, the nature of the work is more or less similar to this model. I finally understand what "a go-getter with drive" means: "long-term repetitive, fixed-posture work," "short periods of high-density, high-intensity work," and working in relatively harsh environments. In open fields it is sun and rain; in greenhouses it is high heat and high humidity; even in plant factories, such as the culture rooms of the mushroom industry, it is so cold you can hardly stand it (you can even get frostbite). And if it is still a conventional production model, there is more or less the risk of chemical contamination too.
And the people who can handle this kind of work are what my friend calls "driven go-getters."
Only driven go-getters can survive in agriculture, my friend says.
My friend is thirsting for talent, but unfortunately, because my own social circle is narrow, I could only sincerely recommend the invincible iron man to him.
'The countryside' a different world
When it comes to rural life, the author has had a deep experience. Some agricultural work, such as spraying, is something rural children have done every day since they were very small, following their fathers and grandfathers. For them it is something routine in life. They can already handle these processes skillfully, like eating and drinking. Blazing sun, overtime work, being covered in pesticide, being covered in mud: for rural children, it is all just ordinary fare.
Why can rural laborers tolerate such a working environment? The main reason is that, at certain times, agriculture can earn a profit ratio that is truly shockingly high; it is the concept of making "vegetable money." Or else, the nature of agricultural work is hard when you are doing it, but there is also plenty of idle time, and people hold to the idea of "earning freedom." Making big money from production-marketing imbalances and earning the freedom of the agricultural off-season: this model is common in the author's surrounding environment. Of course, it is not entirely like this. In fact, some friends hold to a model of retirement and health, but let us set that aside for now.
Whether for making money, earning leisure, or earning freedom, basically new farming methods are not very attractive to these groups. Why? Take organic agriculture. For agricultural work that is already incredibly hard, engaging in organic agriculture leaves only two choices. One is to directly triple the workload and cut yields by 40 percent. The other is to cheat: forge documents, exploit loopholes, pass off inferior goods as good ones, and pass off conventional produce as organic.
This mode of operation no longer fits the essence of rural labor. That is, the final result of this model is: "If you do it for real, you make no money and get no leisure"; "some rules, if you fake them, the certification companies cannot catch you anyway." So when these are actually rolled out, their credibility is doubted even by people actually working in agriculture. How can that win the public's trust?
This is a fundamental problem.
Rural children bear the main force of the entire agricultural production. They are skilled in traditional agricultural work, have land in their hands, are familiar with the local area, and are used to rural life. All of this lets us draw the following conclusion: these people are in fact the foundation of Taiwan, China's agriculture. If their pay and environment cannot be guaranteed, and if they cannot first secure food and clothing before knowing honor and shame, and then improve the overall quality level, expecting Taiwan, China's agricultural industry to upgrade seems somewhat difficult.
This problem is no longer about age, no longer about physical strength, no longer about knowledge, and no longer about all sorts of ideals. It is the overall environment that forces them subjectively not to be willing, and objectively makes it impossible, to pursue industrial upgrading.
On labor protection
As for the labor shortage, we really need to think seriously about what it actually means.
The legislative purpose of the Labor Standards Act is to protect workers' most basic rights, but the various kinds of agricultural work often cannot guarantee the basic rights of workers. In the past, these problems could only be absorbed through the family-run system. On solving the labor problem, academia calls for mechanization, industry believes foreign workers should be brought in, and the agricultural side wants to bring new blood and surplus labor into agriculture. In the author's view, the fundamental problem is actually the same: our production model needs transformation, or upgrading.
At present, our country's agriculture mainly still relies on human labor to solve problems, and most current workers have no occupational accident insurance at all, and most of their work has no education or training either. Whether training on safety, regulatory compliance, or effectiveness, there is none, let alone the question of conformity. And when they work in the fields, complete protective measures are rarely seen. They are often directly exposed to risk, and this kind of work is obviously unattractive.
(Quoted from the "Nong Tianxia" Facebook page)
A farming friend wrote this heartfelt message on FB, explaining that both employees and employers lack a shared understanding of agriculture's "job content" and "job protection." People often need to cooperate to complete a job, and "employment" is a relatively simple cooperative relationship. Compared with partnerships, shareholders, and cross-industry alliances, "employment" is a very simple model, yet even such a simple model is relatively immature in agriculture.
To explain the problem further, the difficulty in bringing rural labor in lies in three points. A: Rural work is very hard; it is short-term, high-intensity work, and cannot be dragged out. B: Labor conditions are poor. C: Whether it is the person hiring or the person hired, their psychological understanding of the "employment" relationship is still relatively shallow and primitive. When an ordinary enterprise hires someone at 22K, is that really all it pays? No. In fact, it also includes labor insurance, health insurance, and even extra workers' accident insurance. But in agriculture, these extra costs do not exist in the employment relationship.
Rural life is truly freelance work. If a worker takes a job spraying pesticide over two jia today, and if he is nimble, he can finish spraying in half a day, and the rest of the time is all his own. He can drink and make tea with friends. For half a day's work, he gets 1,500 to 2,000 yuan in cash. It seems very easy to earn, and both buyer and seller are satisfied.
But in fact, the aftereffects brought by the lack of protective measures, the risk of accidents, and, without farmers' insurance, the individual also bearing pension and health insurance costs, all must be borne entirely by oneself. Sometimes workers are simply standing nakedly in such a harsh environment.
All of this really leaves people unable to see a future.
On corporatization
People often say there is a deep disconnect between academia and industry in agriculture. I think one reason is that the industry environment fundamentally does not give agricultural graduates with academic training much space. For example, if I were a technician trained in chemical engineering, when I enter society I do not need to build a chemical plant myself to put my learning to use. I can enter an already corporatized company or enterprise and, on the existing foundation, maintain, improve, and innovate. In this model, maximizing benefits has allowed this small piece of land, Taiwan, China, to produce several world-leading chemical groups.
Taiwan, China has traditionally had a smallholder system, mainly based on family operations. This system is not good at collaboration. Generally, production techniques are passed down within the family, and outsiders are rarely hired, because those who can do the work soon strike out on their own, while those who cannot do it do not last long at all. As a result, our agricultural production is cut into small, fragmented units, with not much space or possibility to absorb these students trained by agricultural education.
Given the current situation, Taiwan, China's agriculture needs automated equipment to improve work efficiency, needs a production traceability system to ensure that the production process meets standards, and needs more diverse talent to join agricultural production. More precisely, all these needs point to the need for greater capital investment in agriculture, that is, Taiwan, China's agricultural production model should shift from a smallholder system to corporatized agricultural production.
In the past two years, voices have begun to be heard calling for corporatization in agriculture, and recently agricultural subsidies and resources have kept expecting agricultural groups to corporatize. But the meaning of corporatization lies not only in enjoying rights; more importantly, it must bear obligations. To go further, when obligations are violated, it must also bear responsibility.
We look forward to corporatization, not only hoping to see uniformly standardized agricultural products, not only hoping to see an effective safety assurance system, not only hoping to see Dutch, Japanese, and Israeli systems one after another, not only hoping to see dozens or hundreds of pieces of automated equipment.
In fact, we hope even more to see agricultural workers become more diverse, with specialists in plant protection, agricultural machinery, agrochemicals, agronomy, and food all able to put their talents to use on this platform, and to get jobs protected in line with the Labor Standards Act and with opportunities for advancement. We hope even more that after corporatization, employees can obtain proper safety protection, proper education and training, and a proper working environment, so that talent can fully draw out the productivity and quality it should. This is the real reason corporatization is needed.
If corporatization is only about having a unified tax ID number to receive government subsidies, if corporatization is only a channel for hiring foreign workers, if corporatization only takes on various rights without corresponding obligations, then in essence it is still just an enlarged version of traditional agriculture.