The Corners of Altay: Pastoralists Who Grow, Cut and Buy Hay
In early August 2025, I returned to a traditional Kazakh pastoral village in the south-east of Altay and arrived just in time for the hay-cutting. Ever since the television drama My Altay” became a sensation two years ago, “Altay” has come to represent “the life people long for”. Yet beyond tourism and pop culture, what are the real circumstances facing Altay’s pastoralists?
The hay meadows reveal one of the transformations the pastoral areas have undergone: Over the past few decades, agricultural cultivation in traditional pastoral regions has expanded rapidly, squeezing grazing land. Pastoralists can no longer grow enough fodder for winter themselves, and hay has moved toward a market orientation.
The demand for fodder requires pastoralists not only to master agricultural skills, but also to purchase commercial hay from the market. Through this long process of sweeping change and livelihood transformation, the hay meadows reflect pastoralists caught in an “in-between state”: faced with the relentless advance of modernisation/marketisation, they are still playing catch-up, stuck between nomadism and settlement, herding and wage labour, self-sufficiency and consumption, cooperation and competition.
So before answering “What should pastoral areas do?”, perhaps we might try to understand first: why have hay meadows appeared in the corners of pastoral areas? How are they affecting pastoralists? And why must they buy hay?
I. I. The Hay Meadows of Altay
History bears this out. Altay lies in northern Xinjiang, where the borders of Mongolia, Russia and Kazakhstan converge. Kazakh pastoralists have practised transhumance across the alpine grasslands of the Altai Mountains for generations – the grassland nurtures the livestock, the livestock sustains the pastoralists, and the pastoralists care for the grassland; this people–grass–livestock balance has sustained the traditional nomadic way of life across the long sweep of time.
Yet now this pattern of work and life has already changed. Since the 1980s, pastoralists have gradually shifted towards a semi-nomadic, semi-sedentary existence.
In spring, once the snow melts, pastoralists drive their flocks out of the valley settlements. From May to October they carry out half a year of transhumant herding, with the cattle and sheep feeding mainly on natural grassland – the critical fattening phase. Only when the animals grow fat and strong can they fetch a good price at market. From November to April, the grasslands within the Altai Mountains lie buried beneath heavy snow, and winter stretches across half the year. Both pastoralists and livestock return to the settlements, and to see the animals through the cold months, pastoralists must prepare ample fodder well in advance.
One of the principal sources of that stored fodder is the hay meadow.
In August 2025, the Kazakh pastoralists of J village on the southern foothills of the Altai Mountains entered the busiest stretch before summer’s end: hay-cutting. J village is a traditional pastoral village, sitting right beside the border with Mongolia. For half a month running, at 10 a.m. (8 a.m. Xinjiang time), the chugging of mowers echoed along both banks of the river valley while tractors hauling hay crawled slowly along the road winding through the meadows.
Replacing manual mowing with mechanical mowers only became common in J village five or six years ago.
Pastoralist Serik bought a mower a few years back. One day in early August, he spent the morning helping a relative mow ten mu of grass, then appeared at his own hay meadow in the afternoon, working on until nearly 10 p.m. A mower can only operate on flat, contiguous ground; where the land slopes and undulates, workers must swing a scythe by hand, cutting through the grass clump by clump. Once the grass is cut, a hay rake is brought in to gather it into neat rows.
Helping relatives with hay-cutting is perfectly ordinary here. On 6 August, Askar’s brother and sister-in-law, his sister and brother-in-law, and his sister’s children all turned up – the task that day was to haul the entire hay crop from twenty mu of meadow back to Askar’s house.
Out on the meadow, one person drives the tractor forward at a slow crawl while Askar and the male relatives follow on either side, using steel forks to lift the hay heaps and send them forkful after forkful onto the tractor. A man perched on top arranges the hay arriving from below in careful layers. Children and women trail behind, collecting any strays. The grass had already been spread on the ground to dry for several days; now that the moisture had evaporated, a swipe of the rake revealed, beneath the sun-baked surface, a thin fringe of vivid green still clinging to the roots.
In the gaps between bouts of labour, people rest under the shade of a tree and eat watermelon. For those whose meadows lie far from home, the day begins at dawn with two pots of milk tea decanted into a thermos, along with naan, sweets, watermelon and tableware – the whole family spends the daylight hours together on the hay meadow.
The tractor makes three fully loaded round trips. By half past eight, with the sun sinking to the west, the harvest is finally in.
II. When Pastoralists Start Growing Grass
After the 1980s, pastoral areas gradually adopted the Household Responsibility System common in farming regions, with grassland and livestock both contracted to individual households (that is, “dual contracting of grassland and livestock“), thereby declaring the end of the commune era. The tradition of cooperative herding and mutual aid among pastoral households, which had persisted from the tribal era through the commune period, also came to an end. An unprecedented family-based system of herding took its place, and pastoralists now needed a grassland certificate in order to move their cattle and sheep to the seasonal pastures. The grassland certificate records not only the extent, area and carrying capacity of the summer, winter and spring-autumn pastures; hay meadows are also allocated on it.
As in farming areas, pastoral grassland certificates follow a “no additions for births, no removals for deaths” policy. In J village, the government issued 92 certificates to 92 pastoralist households in the 1990s. Forty years on, the number of households has grown to over 270 – nearly threefold – yet neither the number of certificates nor the area of grazing land has changed. According to local government statistics, as a traditional pastoral village J village has approximately 553,000 mu of natural grassland, around 641 mu of sown grassland and some 1,600 mu of hay meadow.
This situation is widespread across pastoral areas. The grasslands, now divided among individual households, have become a limited, competitive resource that can no longer be consolidated or shifted as freely as before. Left with no alternative, pastoralists have even strung up fences to keep outsiders or residents of neighbouring villages from encroaching on their land.
When the children of the first generation to hold grassland certificates grow up and set up separate households, the siblings must still share the one certificate. This, in turn, has forced a shift in pastoral livelihoods. A new tradition has emerged: the certificate is inherited by one brother – according to Kazakh custom, usually the youngest, who receives the bulk of the parents’ assets and assumes the duty of caring for them – and the nomadic way of life continues. The other brothers, holding no certificate, piece together a livelihood from multiple sources. A few take up scarce government posts as border patrol workers or forest rangers; most take on wage work (for instance, cutting sunflowers, digging potatoes or irrigating fields for large-scale growers in farming villages) and keep a small herd of cattle and sheep in pens (most pastoralists now own no more than twenty or thirty sheep and a dozen or so cattle).
And so, when the transhumance season arrives, those without a certificate hand their cattle and sheep to the brother who holds one, to take out to the natural grassland; while the brother who sets off from the settlement with the certificate leaves the hay meadow in the care of his other siblings.
Since the hay meadows appeared, the productive activities of pastoralists still living by traditional herding have become interwoven with farming.
Even back in the commune era, alongside meadows where wild grasses grew naturally, the commune organised pastoralists to sow lucerne, silage maize and other fodder crops. Once the hay meadows were allocated to individual households, the practice of sowing pasture continued on the pastoralists’ own meadows.
Lucerne is regarded in pastoral areas as the “king of forage” – high in protein and easily digested by livestock. Of the dozen or so households visited during this trip, at least a third grow it. Silage maize, by contrast, is very much an intensive-cultivation crop: it demands more from the soil and the water supply, and pastoralists must also master farming techniques such as spraying pesticides and applying fertiliser. After harvesting, the maize is placed in a silage pit for anaerobic fermentation. According to a J village pastoralist who drives a tractor to haul hay, the area under silage maize in J village currently stands at less than 200 mu.
When pastoralists began growing grass, they found themselves better suited to managing natural wild grasses, which require only watering – no sowing, no fertilising. Sown pasture demands more advanced agricultural skills, and a household’s willingness to grow it depends on its own circumstances, including the costs involved.
III. The Ledger of Growing Grass
The snow on the hay meadows has usually melted by April. From May onwards, pastoralists water the meadows once every ten days to a fortnight; before August they irrigate five or six times as a rule, and sometimes as many as eight or nine.
The irrigation water comes from River C. To secure water for agriculture across the river-valley basin, a stretch of River C – a tributary of the Ulungur River – was dammed at J village in the late 1970s to build the locally well-known Reservoir D. Today, the main canal runs from the midstream meadows and settlements all the way down to the farming villages, providing a reliable water supply for both hay meadows and cropland.
Irrigation water charges are calculated according to the type of grassland, its area and the method of irrigation. Qinghe County’s advance water fee schedule for agricultural irrigation sets the drip-irrigation rate for hay meadows at 49.08 yuan per mu and flood irrigation at 54.23 yuan.
Irrigating lucerne and silage maize costs noticeably more than watering a hay meadow of natural wild grass. Drip irrigation for lucerne is priced at 66.89 yuan per mu and flood irrigation at 83.4 yuan. For silage maize, drip and flood irrigation cost 75.4 yuan and 106.43 yuan per mu respectively. The water station requires pastoralists to settle these charges in full before October. Askar’s brother-in-law planted eight mu of maize in 2025, irrigated by drip system throughout; he paid his water bill in July – 603.2 yuan in total.
It is not only irrigation that costs money. Buying seed, mowing, raking, baling, hauling – every step carries a charge.
Take Askar’s household in 2024 as an example. They have twenty mu of hay meadow growing natural wild grass and ten mu of lucerne. Using the cheaper drip-irrigation method, water charges came to 1,650.5 yuan. During hay-cutting, mechanical mowing across thirty mu cost 900 yuan in total. Thirty kilos of lucerne seed at 60 yuan per kilo cost 1,800 yuan (note: lucerne seed is purchased once every three to four years). The first year’s lucerne harvest totalled 160 square bales, with baling charges of 480 yuan. Tally it all up, and the cost from sowing to harvest already exceeds 4,800 yuan.
As the line items multiply, pastoralists are often unable to give a firm figure when asked how much they spend each year managing their hay meadows. They devote most of their attention to the cattle and sheep, stressing that the fodder must be enough to see the animals through winter – no one can bear to watch them starve.
What has also gone unmanaged is the pasture harvest. Before the dual contracting of grassland and livestock, hay on the meadows was managed collectively by the commune. Now, the yield rests on the pastoralists’ own shoulders.
Hay meadow yields are shaped by a host of factors – climate, soil, geography, water availability, the number of irrigations – and vary considerably from mu to mu. Drawing on figures supplied by pastoralists, tractor operators, mower operators and baler operators alike, J village’s hay meadows recorded reduced harvests to varying degrees in 2025.
Pastoralists are expert at grazing and tending their animals. They know exactly how to manage a flock during transhumance, how much grass a cow needs to get through winter, how to read the fattening condition of cattle and sheep. Yet the agricultural know-how needed to manage sown pasture is still unfamiliar here. Ask why the harvest fell short, and you will get as many answers as there are voices: “The weather has been far too dry,” “There have been so many grasshoppers this year,” “The grass has not grown as tall as it used to” …
On balance, several ecological changes in J village in 2025 have at least indirectly contributed to the reduced yields.
On the one hand, degradation of the upstream pastures and diminished water-holding capacity in the soil mean that, in spring, snowmelt from the high-altitude pastures surges downhill as floodwater, battering the hay meadows along both banks of the river valley and affecting soil fertility, grass species and more. Some pastoralists’ hay meadows have been washed away entirely, shrinking in area.
On the other, J village’s climate is arid, with a long-term average annual rainfall of under 200 mm, placing it among ecologically fragile regions. In the past, July would bring two or three rainfalls lasting several days. In 2025, pastoralists say, the rain came either as a sudden downpour that swept across the dry ground and ran off without soaking in, or as a brief drizzle that evaporated before it could penetrate the soil.
Yet the picture is not uniformly bleak. Askar’s twenty mu of hay meadow yielded three loads – roughly six tonnes – in both 2025 and 2024. Aknur’s nineteen mu rose from five tonnes to eight tonnes; she attributes the increase mainly to one of her larger meadows, which received several extra irrigations compared with the previous year.
IV. Grass Runs Short, Bought to Make Up – Pasture Goes to Market
Originally, the pastoral regions of the Altai Mountains had no dedicated agricultural zones. After the founding of the People’s Republic, agriculture began to take root in these traditional pastoral areas. Following this trend, the arable area in C township has continued to expand, with ever more flat, well-watered valley grasslands converted to farmland. By 2023, C township held 42,200 mu of arable land, 4,500 mu of sown grassland, 6,400 mu of natural hay meadow and 2.05 million mu of natural grassland.
Carrying over the commune-era distinction between agricultural and pastoral production teams, C township is administratively divided into three farming villages and three pastoral villages. Separate agricultural and pastoral production was organised and managed collectively by the commune during the collectivisation era. But after the contracting of grassland and livestock to individual households in the 1980s, the number of cattle and sheep in the farming villages has climbed year by year, rivaling and even exceeding those in the pastoral villages. This shift has also bred a growing estrangement between farming and pastoral residents, creating a sense of imbalance in their livelihoods: pastoral villagers, whose income depends on grazing, now face not only degraded grasslands and declining carrying capacity, but must also buy fodder from the farming areas and take on casual work in the agricultural villages; while farming villagers enjoy the dual income of land rental and their own herds of cattle and sheep.
A villager from farming village T explains that land rental prices vary by crop: his arable land is leased to a large-scale grower for wheat at 680 yuan per mu. For potatoes, the rate is 800 yuan per mu; oilseed sunflowers command the highest rent, at 1,100 to 1,200 yuan per mu.
Yet the interests of farming and pastoral residents, however opposed they may appear, simply pit the weakest players at the bottom of a single chain against one another. Bargaining power lies in the hands of the larger stakeholders – agribusiness companies, fodder enterprises and other well-capitalised interests.
In the broader picture of livestock modernisation, fodder has moved onto the open market across the great pastoral regions of Inner Mongolia, Qinghai and Xinjiang.
Since the mid-1990s, Xinjiang has vigorously promoted the construction of sown fodder and feed bases. Qinghe County’s development plan sets out to “adjust the agricultural planting structure and build a tripartite model of grain, cash crops and fodder.” By 2024, the area under fodder crops in Qinghe County had reached 140,000 mu.
On the market, fodder of the same specification carries different prices: hay, lucerne and wheat straw are all priced differently. Taking the standard 20 kg bale as an example, lucerne commands the highest price – in 2024 a bale started at 30 yuan and rose to a peak of 45 yuan; hay is somewhat cheaper, though at its peak it too reached 30 yuan a bale; wheat straw is the cheapest, ranging between 10 and 15 yuan.
Gurban lives by grazing, keeping seventy cashmere goats, thirty sheep, twenty cattle and eleven horses. In early August 2025, he rode his motorcycle back from the summer pasture to the settlement, cut hay with his family and brought in four hundred bales. He decided to wait until the fodder market opened before buying another thousand bales – four hundred of lucerne and six hundred of wheat straw. The amount he needs to purchase is two and a half times his own meadow yield.
He expects fodder prices to rise from the previous year. “This year the grass on the mountain was not enough – the cattle and sheep have gone thin.” Pastoralists who have come down from the summer pasture to cut hay all speak of the same shortage: not enough grass to eat. Since moving to the summer pasture at Sandao Haizi on 5 July, by 10 August the landscape there had turned a vast pallid brown across the hillsides, with only a thin sheen of pale green clinging to the grassland around the marshland margins. Some pastoralists had already begun dismantling their yurts in preparation for the onward move.
If cattle and sheep do not fatten sufficiently over the summer, they are prone to illness in winter, and pastoralists must stockpile even more fodder to see the animals safely through the cold months. Working from last year’s early-market prices (lucerne at 32 yuan per bale, wheat straw at 10 yuan), plus a likely increase, Gurban says he needs to have at least 20,000 yuan ready.
The pastoralists’ reliance on the fodder market is deepening year by year, and the financial pressure grows apace.
Although Askar inherited the grassland certificate, he has handed it over to his elder brother, who still practises transhumance. Askar stays at home to look after his elderly mother, and his livestock is mainly cattle. When we visited his household at the end of 2024, he kept sixteen cattle, three horses, two sheep and one goat. Before winter that year, he bought eight hundred bales of wheat straw from the market at ten yuan a bale, spending 8,000 yuan. Added to the 4,800 yuan in hay-meadow and lucerne growing costs mentioned earlier, Askar’s household spent a total of 12,800 yuan on winter fodder.
That sum was roughly equivalent to the income from selling two cattle that year. Askar’s household has six members. Their livelihood comes from selling cattle, repairing border fencing, digging potatoes in the farming areas, hosting a handful of family tourists, and receiving the annual grass-livestock balance subsidy and border resident allowance from the government. Taken together, the family’s 2024 income came to around 78,000 yuan – 13,000 yuan per person.
This figure falls slightly below the per-capita average for farming and pastoral residents of C township, where J village is located, in 2023. Government records show that C township’s per-capita income for farming and pastoral residents was 17,900 yuan in 2023. For a pastoralist household, winter fodder is an expenditure that cannot be ignored.
V. Finding a Way Out from the “Middle”
Across this long era of upheaval and livelihood transition, what other options remain for pastoralists?
A public-interest organisation – the Xinjiang Mountains-and-Waters Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development Centre (hereafter Xinjiang Landscape) – has been working in traditional pastoral areas since 2017 and is trying to answer that very question.
In the past, they helped villagers in the settlement where they were based to set up environmental protection co-operatives, produce and sell traditional handmade black soap, and develop eco-tourism as supplementary livelihoods for pastoralists. Now they plan to go a step further – to find ways of strengthening the resilience of the primary livestock livelihood while nurturing diverse alternatives.
Last year they took pastoralists from the settlement village on a visit to Inner Mongolia, where they saw a retired village party secretary leading pastoralists to form a pasture co-operative that bulk-buys fodder each year, bringing down the cost.
In these geographically and developmentally marginal places, bringing back some of the cooperative practices of the collective era may well be an option worth trying for pastoralists caught in this “intermediate state”. And the arrival of Xinjiang Landscape is, in its own way, sparking new possibilities.
[2] Source of C township arable land and grassland area data: document “Implementation Plan for Dredging at the Tail End of Dongfeng Reservoir, Qinghe County, Xinjiang.pdf”
[3] Source of Qinghe County fodder crop planting area data for 2024: Qinghe County government website https://xjqh.gov.cn/xwzx/001005/20250812/856c3f7a-dbdb-4b32-827a-b8f02a1c3de9.html
[4] Source of C township per-capita income data for farming and pastoral residents in 2023: document “Implementation Plan for Dredging at the Tail End of Dongfeng Reservoir, Qinghe County, Xinjiang.pdf”
*The pastoralists interviewed in this article – Askar, Sairik, Nurpek, Tasbul, Gurban, Turgan, Nurthan, Aknur and Yerpek – are all pseudonyms
Thanks to the Xinjiang Mountains-and-Waters Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development Centre for their assistance with this article
Thanks to the pastoralists who took time from their labour to answer questions and offered kindness and trust in conversation
Thanks to local students Aibota, Ahzhol, Altenai, Gulimina, kuoerkeyisen and Waliha for providing Kazakh translation support
Thanks to Guljainat and her family for their welcoming, generous hospitality
Unless otherwise stated, all photographs were taken by the author
Edited by: Xiao Dan