Whose Mechanisation? Upgraded Harvesters and Unemployed Farmers
I. Farm Machinery Memories of the Post-00s
The harvesters worked plot by plot, so everyone queued up waiting their turn. If rain threatened, we would rush to finish the crop overnight. The village was responsible for the operators’ food and lodging. Whichever family’s crops were being cut at midday would host the driver for lunch, while he would stay overnight with the household that had originally contacted him. Once the rice was cut, we would spread it out on the threshing floor just outside our door—an open patch of earth flattened with a stone roller, used for drying grain. As a child, I’d often stand beside the roller, hands on its four wheels, surveying my domain.
It wasn’t until 2009 that my family finally bought a harvester. Our first was a Kubota 488. Later that same year, we purchased a second-hand old green model. That particular harvester was ubiquitous at the time. Most machines visiting the village looked much the same, though the green harvesters stood out vividly against the golden fields.
Once the old green combine retired from service, the Kubota harvesters, which lost far less grain, quickly won the villagers’ favour. However, the Kubota 488 had its own drawbacks: a relatively small grain tank. Models like the 488 and 588 required workers to manually strap sacks onto a metal frame, open the discharge chute, and let the grain flow in. Once a sack was full, it would be loosely tied, dropped onto the field, and each held roughly 50 kg (100 jin). Consequently, alongside the machine operator, a “bag handler” was always needed.
Back then, most people in this line of work were men. A single mu of land would yield at least 1,200 jin (600 kg) of rice, translating to 120 sacks. Given that northern Anhui is largely flat with expansive plots, the workload during the peak harvest rush was immense.
During harvest season, it was common to see a vast rice paddy with a combine moving slowly through it. The driver sat covered in dust at the controls, while another person followed to handle the sacks and operated an instrument to measure the harvested area. The field would be a mix of standing, uncut rice and neatly piled, heavy sacks—some yellow urea bags, others the distinctive pink-and-yellow split sacks from the Hong Sifang brand. Farmers and their three-wheeled vehicles would wait at the field’s edge, ready to collect the filled sacks.
II. The Unemployed Fourth Uncle
Because the machine met the criteria for cross-regional harvesting work (holding the correct certificate, matching registration details, staying within size limits, and carrying no mixed cargo), combines were exempt from highway tolls when travelling between regions. In the past, my father would drive a large transport truck carrying the harvester that needed a bag handler. Fourth Uncle would sit in the passenger seat, a thick atlas of China spread before him. In those days before GPS, veteran machine operators relied entirely on such maps to navigate across the country.
Fourth Uncle used to work in construction away from home, but he would always return to the village during peak harvest to help with the rush. Before contracting land to establish family farms became widespread, there was a common belief among farmers: no matter how far away you went to work, the family land could never be left to lie fallow.
Eventually, however, Fourth Uncle found himself out of a job. Due to his age, construction sites no longer hired him. And the harvest rush no longer needed bag handlers either. Modern Kubota harvesters now come with air-conditioned cabs and sealed glass windows that keep dust out, effectively preventing dust-related lung conditions. Large grain tanks have also become standard equipment, so farmers no longer have to lug heavy sacks across the fields to their vehicles. They simply need to position a three-wheeler with a large cargo bed nearby and let the machine unload directly into it once the tank is full.
With the bag-handling role rendered obsolete, Fourth Uncle was forced to stay home in retirement, occasionally taking on odd jobs for neighbours like drying grain or helping with house building.
Once the rice harvest is finished, it is time to sow wheat. Red wheat seeds (note: seeds treated with a red pesticide coating to guard against soil-borne pests and bacteria that could hinder germination; the coating is typically red, hence the seeds’ colour) are scattered across the soil. Planting rice is more labour-intensive than wheat, as it requires transplanting seedlings. Originally, this was done entirely by hand, paid per mu at an average rate of 220 yuan, with board and lodging included. Later, the introduction of transplanting machines significantly boosted efficiency, saving both time and effort. However, these machines can only operate in shallow water, leaving deep-water plots and small, fragmented fields to rely on manual labour.
In recent years, during the peak harvest, government officials still occasionally stop combines at highway toll booths, directing operators to nearby fields in need of work. They also provide the operators with a “cross-regional work service pack” containing towels, soap, bottled water, face masks, summer cooling essentials, and a field guidance sheet. By offering consultation and operational advice, the government helps alleviate local shortages of machinery, ensuring operators arrive where work is available and can depart smoothly once finished.
Those who did this work were mostly men, independent contractors who relied on their physical strength to take on odd jobs. Spreading fertiliser simply meant slinging a woven basket filled with it over one’s shoulder, putting on gloves, walking out to the fields, and scattering it evenly, handful by handful. For pesticide spraying, workers would either strap a sprayer tank to their backs or lay out long hoses along the field edges, dragging them across the plots as they worked. The equipment was heavy and the hoses awkward to haul. Before agricultural drones became commonplace, a season’s worth of spraying and fertilising would take a fortnight to complete. Now, with a drone, the same task covering 30 mu can be finished in just eight to ten minutes.
The evolution of farm machinery is woven throughout my memories of growing up. Technological progress has brought immense change to agriculture, and drying the harvest is no longer the backbreaking chore it once was. We now have grain suction pumps, grain-turning machines, and mechanical dryers. Traditional threshing floors are steadily being paved over with concrete, while old stone rollers have been pushed under house eaves, as though silently bearing out the old proverb that dripping water wears away stone. But the eaves themselves are now being torn down; new houses are built without them, leaving the stone rollers with nowhere left to rest.
The winds of smart agriculture will perhaps eventually reach every single village. For children in remote areas, the sight of drones working the skies and wind turbines standing tall in the fields will become their first impression of modern farming: look, the turbines are turning overhead, and the drones are flying across the fields.
III. New Energy or Diesel Tractors?
Located in western Huaiyuan County, Anhui Province, Longkang Farm is one of twenty large or medium-sized state-owned farms directly overseen by the Anhui Reclamation and Development Group. As the coach rolled onto the estate, the boundless expanse of wheat fields was an almost overwhelming sight. This was none of the familiar patchwork of small, adjoining plots I knew from northern Anhui; rather, it comprised vast, meticulously ordered tracts of land. What truly left me speechless, however, were the colossal machines lined up in the sheds: self-propelled full-feed combine harvesters from John Deere, CLAAS, and Yanmar.
The cabs of these large harvesters are bright and modern, equipped with air conditioning and Bluetooth. What’s truly striking is the driverless harvester: without an operator at the controls, it tracks precisely along the field boundaries, neither encroaching on adjacent land nor missing a single pass. With just a click of the mouse by a technician at the control centre, tractors several kilometres away automatically head into the fields. Once the work is done, the plots on the screen turn green, marking the areas that have been successfully harvested.
During the latter part of the agricultural machinery training, I also visited Wuhu Zoomlion. As a heavy equipment manufacturer, the Wuhu branch not only produces and exports farm machinery but also operates its own farms. Parked across the Wuhu Zoomlion yard were numerous machines with green casings. A company representative explained: “These are our latest tractors, new-energy models, and the harvester beside them runs on new energy too.
The collective intake of breath from the crowd echoed in my mind, mingling with the sigh my father had let out years ago when he decided to sell that old green harvester.
I know that around Fuyang, most farming households will still stick with diesel tractors: they are affordable, straightforward to maintain, and, as locals put it, “fuel pumps are everywhere”.
Some would argue that large-scale farmers and cooperative leaders, armed with advantages in capital, organisation and information, have been the first to catch the “fast train” of mechanisation. Meanwhile, smallholders with limited funds and technical know-how are increasingly marginalised, further widening the income and development divide within rural communities. Much like educational inequality, this is an objective reality.
Yet smallholders are also experimenting with mechanised farming, moving away from purely traditional methods. Take my own village as an example: it encompasses over 9,000 mu of arable land, the majority leased to family farms. The village is home to one agricultural machinery cooperative and more than a dozen family farms. Just in my own zone (the village is large and divided into sections, much like urban wards), there are two harvesters, three tractors and two agricultural drones. All were purchased by the heads of family farms operating plots of over 100 mu. Other farmers, who work smaller areas, simply hire machinery operators and their equipment for the harvest, settling up at a rate of around 68 yuan per mu.
Harvesters, tractors and agricultural drones are so plentiful in my village that some farmers band together to take on cross-regional contracts elsewhere. Yet the village lacks “smart” agricultural machinery such as autonomous harvesters or tractors. With their high price tags, smart machines are deemed “impractical” for smaller family farms and modest machinery cooperatives. The cost of a single smart machine would cover the purchase of two or three conventional ones.
Farmers do the maths carefully before buying machinery. In my village, most opt for second-hand tractors, favouring the Dongfanghong brand, with budgets ranging from 40,000 to 60,000 yuan. A brand-new tractor runs at around 100,000 yuan; with a government subsidy of 10,000 yuan for agricultural equipment, the net cost comes to just over 90,000 yuan. For harvesters, Kubota is the brand of choice, though Lovol is also an option. Take the Kubota EX118MQ-s, for instance: it comes fitted with a chassis height adjustment system that allows the operator to raise or lower the chassis on uneven terrain. Priced at 240,000 yuan with a 29,000 yuan subsidy, it leaves the buyer with a net cost of over 210,000 yuan. Farmers generally prefer to buy harvesters new; with the subsidy applied, the maths works out better. They typically run a machine for a few seasons, sell it on, and reinvest in the latest model.
Perhaps one day, smart agricultural machinery will be within everyone’s reach. For my generation, however, we are destined to be the ferryman between the last of the traditional, hands-on farmers and the first of the modern “commanders”.
Editor: Xiaodan