Altay Pastoralists on Transhumance to Summer Pasture Still Live in the Shadow of the Blizzard
In late June, as we hitched a ride towards Jiangbutas Village in eastern Altay, Xinjiang, we could regularly spot Kazakh pastoralists on horseback driving their cattle and sheep along the transhumance routes, with cars frequently pulling over to give way to the livestock. This is precisely the season for transhumance.
The pastoralists of Altay region have largely retained their semi-nomadic traditions: grazing on alpine pastures in summer, returning to mountain-foot settlements in winter, and transitioning through mid-elevation pastures in spring and autumn. At present, most of the livestock in Jiangbutas Village have already reached the mid-elevation pasture in the Naogan area, waiting to head up the mountains.
Whether in the villages settled at the foot of the mountains or in the gleaming white yurts of the mid-elevation pasture, one can see pastoralists milking their animals, drinking milk tea, and playing with their children – scenes of serenity and joy.
If that were all you saw, you might never imagine that just half a year ago, they had endured a natural disaster the likes of which had not been seen in over a decade. In late November 2022, the entire Altay region experienced a rare blizzard (click to learn more). From 23 November onwards, Jiangbutas Village was buried under five consecutive days of heavy snowfall. Thick snowdrifts blocked all roads in and out of the village; fodder and coal could not be brought in, and pastoralists with inadequate winter reserves could only fret helplessly.
Through the joint efforts of the village committee and the resident charitable organisation, the Xinjiang Shan Shui Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development Centre (hereafter the “Shan Shui Environmental Protection Centre”), the village used over thirty thousand yuan in charitable donations to clear the roads and brought in dozens of tonnes of corn silage feed from outside to distribute free of charge to 41 pastoral households (click to learn more), providing some urgent relief.
During our household-by-household visits, we were deeply moved by the resilience and optimism of most of the pastoralists. In reality, however, many still live in the shadow of last winter’s blizzard. The impact of extreme weather on livestock health, pasture environments, pastoralists’ incomes and living standards has been far more complex and enduring than one might expect.
I. Pastoralists’ Livelihoods After the Blizzard
Like ordinary Kazakh pastoralists, their principal source of income comes from selling livestock at market. Added to his salary, income from agricultural odd jobs, grassland ecological subsidies and reward payments, and border area subsidies, their annual income can typically reach 100,000 yuan. Last year, apart from salary and government subsidies, there was virtually no other income – only expenditure.
Director Bexian explained that the lack of income was because the pandemic in previous years had disrupted the normal livestock trading market. Jiangbutas Village, bordering Mongolia in the northeast, is remote and difficult to reach; traders from other areas could not get in, and local traders took advantage of the situation to drive prices down. A head of local cattle that once fetched seven or eight thousand yuan could bring no more than two or three thousand last year.
With livestock unable to command a fair price, the only option was to keep feeding them, and the long, bitter winters in the Altay mountains only increased herders’ need for fodder. After last year’s once-in-over-a-decade blizzard, winter in Jiangbutas Village lingered for nearly half a year more, until the final snowfall in May finally marked the end of the harsh cold.
In Jiangbutas Village, which has largely preserved the tradition of four-season transhumance, winter is the hardest season for the livestock. The fat reserves the animals have built up over the better part of a year are significantly depleted by this point, and ewes and does nearing lambing need extra care and nourishment.
In years with moderate snowfall, cattle and sheep can roam the winter pasture freely to find grass, licking snow when thirsty. But in a severe winter stretching nearly eight months, when the winter pasture is buried beneath deep snow, herders can only pen their livestock in the settlement’s barns and feed them on purchased fodder.
II. Sickly and Frail Livestock
Sarikguli, the pastoralist who has been driving us to and from households for our door-to-door survey over the past two days, also lost six cattle to the lockdown and the blizzard.
Last winter, Sarikguli’s family had limited fodder reserves and dared not give their livestock the normal amount of supplementary feeding, offering only a small portion each day. She tried another way to supplement their nutrition – every three or four days, mixing raw eggs into a mash with fodder for the cattle – but this could not fundamentally solve the feed shortage.
Hungry cattle could not bear staying penned in the barn and ran off to the hills to forage on their own. Pandemic restrictions had not yet been lifted, and villagers were told to stay indoors; Sarikguli could not check on her cattle regularly up on the mountain. Wolves killed four of them, and another two died of thirst because, penned inside the fencing, they could not get out to drink. The cow she treasured most had lost its ear tag and was therefore ineligible for an insurance claim; she was so furious she did not drink milk tea for two days.
When she spoke of these losses, Sarikguli’s tone was strikingly calm. It was only after the translator finished conveying her words that we, who did not speak the language, grasped just how devastating the losses had been.
I asked Sarikguli how many cattle she planned to bring to market this year. She did not answer directly, saying only, “No one can say what the future holds.” Adding the five head culled due to an animal epidemic, her family had lost half its cattle last year. Nomadic life is full of uncertainty – who could guarantee that nothing unforeseen would happen this year?
Yet perhaps Sarikguli still harboured a faint hope. She added that if prices were good this year and a single cow could fetch over ten thousand yuan, then selling just three would be enough to settle the winter’s feed debts and outstanding loans.
But given the condition of the herd, such expectations were unlikely to materialise. Sarikguli had noticed that this year’s newborn calves would not stay close to their mothers, because the breeding females had not eaten enough in winter and could not produce sufficient milk. Both the mothers and the young were generally frail; all they could hope for now was for the animals to build up fat reserves well over the coming months.
III. Drought-Stricken Pastures
By the villagers’ experience, the snow on Sandao Haizi should have melted nearly all the way by late June. Yet this year considerable snow cover remains unmelted, and the temperature is more than ten degrees lower than in the valley below. We had come up the mountain in short sleeves, only to reach for heavy jackets against the biting wind.
With the snowmelt late and temperatures slow to climb, the mountain grass is growing slowly too. Several pastoralists told us that the move up to the summer pasture will very likely be postponed by a few days this year.
Conditions on the mid-elevation pasture are scarcely better. Director Bexian had noticed that in the Naogan area the grass was faring worse than in previous years and had already begun to dry out.
As we followed Director Bexian to visit eighty-two-year-old Elder Yahuti, a light rain began drifting across the grassland. By the time we stepped into the yurt, our clothes were damp, yet Yahuti’s family were overjoyed – it was the first rain the mountain had seen in two months. But barely twenty minutes later the rain had stopped, and the grassland’s thirst was far from quenched. Director Bexian reckoned this would be another dry year.
In his memory, 2010 marked a turning point. From then on, winter snows grew heavier than before, summer rains grew scarcer, and the air grew ever drier.
With rainfall so insufficient in spring and summer, could the Altay region’s abundant snowmelt, after all, ease the drought on the pastures?
Seventy-six-year-old pastoralist Hayimu patiently resolved our puzzlement: if the snowpack is too deep, it crushes the grassland beneath it, causing soil erosion and leaving the earth bare; and if spring temperatures rise quickly, the rapid melt generates snowmelt floods that are far more likely to scour the pasture away than to seep down and replenish the groundwater beneath it.
Elder Hayimu, who has grazed livestock for decades, is remarkably robust – perhaps from eagle training in his youth, his eyes remain sharp and bright. Though he took up settled life in the valley below a decade ago, he still rides out every day to help his son tend the family’s herd.
When conversation turned to last November’s blizzard, the old man reflected that he had not seen anything so fearsome in sixty years. He told us that if such a storm had struck decades ago, it would certainly have caused heavy losses of both life and livestock. Though the village’s situation was dire this year, fortunately no animals had perished directly from the blizzard.
Recalling past snow disasters, Elder Hayimu also spoke of the sudden sleet that fell in the summer of 1997. His family still remembers the names of the herders from the neighbouring township who froze to death in that blizzard.
IV. An Uncertain Future
Hearing this, we were struck by a sudden clarity. The old man’s embrace of nomadic life was no mere deference to tradition; it also reflected his profound understanding of its ecological value. He spoke with some regret of how many young people today no longer understand grazing at all – “they neither know the benefits of herding nor the drawbacks of not herding.”
So just how much ecological wisdom is embedded in the Kazakh tradition of nomadic herding?
In March this year, the Shan Shui Environmental Protection Centre, inspired and supported by partners including the Heyi Green Charity Foundation and the Vanke Public Welfare Foundation, launched a “Community Survey of Local Knowledge on Climate Change Response in Pastoral Areas.” The project aims, on the one hand, to document and pass on traditional ecological knowledge and, on the other, to deepen pastoralists’ awareness of climate change so that effective adaptations can be developed.
Over more than seven years, women’s groups have been set up in the village, reviving and passing on the traditional Kazakh craft of making black soap; villagers have been trained to run family guesthouses for the tourist trade; summer camps have been organised for children, drawing on university students from both near and far to introduce them to ecological knowledge and traditional wisdom…
Years of steady work have made the Shan Shui Environmental Protection Centre team the most welcomed outsiders in the village. When last year’s snow disaster struck, Xinjiang Shan Shui moved swiftly to raise funds, providing the village with urgently needed relief and helping villagers understand the value of an NGO acting as a bridge between the community and the wider world.
In the eyes of local government officials, the Shan Shui team has brought fresh ideas for development, funding, social resources, and new working methods – empowering ordinary residents and enabling the government’s rural revitalisation policies to take root in the village.
Eid al-Adha falls at the end of June. We said our farewells to Jiangbutas Village a little early, while the Shan Shui team stayed on to work in the village and share in the festivities with everyone. For the pastoralists, the most beautiful and cherished season – life on the summer pasture – is just beginning. Let us close by borrowing a Kazakh proverb we heard many times along the way, and offer it as our thanks and blessing to our pastoralist friends in Altay: as long as one is healthy and safe, all is well.
Foodthink Contributor
Foodthink has long followed livestock issues. Since 2018, we have published a series of articles on pastoral life and pastoral areas, hoping to record the real experiences of pastoralists and explore how they can live more sustainably in a changing world. If these issues resonate with you, if you have first-hand materials and stories from the ground, or if you have your own insights, we welcome your contributions – please submit or get in touch.
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Editor: Tianle