Beyond Henan’s “Harvest-Ruining Rain”, Guanzhong Plain Farmers Worry About Their Wheat
I. Abnormally Intense Rainfall
Over the following two months, the wheat went through anthesis, heading and grain filling, eventually growing plump, grain-filled ears. The other villagers’ wheat, though not as tall as the farm’s, was also growing well.
Late May is the critical period for wheat maturation. If all went well, after Grain in Ear, the wheat across the Guanzhong Plain would be gradually harvested by migrant wheat harvesters operating combine harvesters, and Lüwo Farm’s wheat was also scheduled for harvesting around 10 June.
Unexpectedly, on 25 May, a peal of thunder cracked open the sky just as dawn broke, and a torrential downpour followed close behind. The pattering on the roof woke me from my sleep.
I had assumed summer thunderstorms had simply arrived early in May, never expecting them to open nearly two weeks of endless grey rain. I have lived in Shaanxi for eight years and have never seen May rain fall so long, so heavily. From 25 May until 4 June, apart from two days of slight clearing, it rained moderate rain for several hours or even the whole day, every single day.
II. “Fallen Wheat Is Just Straw”
The 10 mu of “Abro wheat” had only just begun turning from green to yellowish-green before the rain; the 10 mu of “spelt wheat” was still vivid green; before the rain, the bulk of the ears on the 40 mu of “Wanmai 52” were still green, maturing roughly a week later than the villagers’ wheat.
The farm’s wheat had not yet reached maturity, so the immediate worry about machinery being unable to enter the fields for harvesting was not pressing. Yet the endless rain brought a different set of problems.
Abro wheat and spelt wheat are tall-stalk varieties: mature plants grow at least one metre tall, and spelt wheat can even approach 1.3 metres. In conditions of prolonged rain, lodging is the most likely problem.
In recent years, most new wheat varieties are lodging-resistant dwarf varieties, which is also what the majority of villagers have chosen. Lüwo Farm, however, whose primary products are wholemeal biscuits and wheat flour, opted for taste and flavour, selecting the Abro wheat — a tall-stalk heritage variety gradually abandoned by local farmers — and spelt wheat, an ancient grain with a long history.
Growing tall-stalk varieties carries a certain risk, but Lüwo Farm has been improving its soil with Australian biodynamic agriculture for years. The wheat has well-developed root systems, sturdy plants and upward-growing leaves, making it less prone to lodging.
We heard that in the summer of 2017, before the wheat harvest, the Guanzhong Plain had also suffered widespread lodging due to prolonged heavy rain and strong winds. At Lüwo Farm, however, only wheat growing beside irrigation channels, where water had pooled for a long time, lodged — a mere 5% of the cultivated area.
This year’s prolonged rain has clearly exceeded normal parameters. From 29 May, lodging spread across the wheat fields. At first it affected only small patches, but with each successive downpour, more stalks failed to bear the weight of waterlogged ears, and the lodging gradually merged into broad swathes.
Of the farm’s 60 mu of wheat, the Abro wheat suffered the worst lodging — by eye, three or four mu lay strewn in every direction. The spelt wheat, still in its growing phase, also showed scattered patches of lodging. Even the shorter-stalked Wanmai 52 developed several sizable bald spots.
III. Addressing Lodging, Immediate Remediation
Carrying a heavy water tank and petrol engine across a wheat field about to be harvested, maintaining the right pace while constantly swinging the spray wand, is no easy task. In fact, it was the hardest job I encountered during my entire internship.
One mu required a round trip of over 400 metres; the lads were exhausted after a single pass. Walking through the tall spelt wheat, we quickly lost our bearings, and the upward spray landed squarely on our heads, soaking us to the skin while lumps of earth kept falling into our boots. I tried it only once — I stumbled over weeds several times and wasted half a tank of preparation by walking too slowly.
IV. Sprouting and Mould
Fortunately, because naturally grown wheat ripens unevenly, only a very small proportion of plants were over-mature, and sprouting was confined to a few individual Abro wheat stalks. The days after the rain stopped were all sunny, and the trend was halted in time.
On 9 June, most of the wheat in Xinzhuang Village, where Lüwo Farm is located, and in the surrounding area had yet to be harvested. From a distance, the sunlit sea of wheat was not the lovely golden yellow of a normal harvest but a dull or ashen yellow, with some patches turning grey-brown. This meant the husks had blackened and the grain inside may well have been affected by mould.
Even among the handful of villagers who had already harvested and sun-dried their wheat, some portions were infected with red or black mould. If wheat encounters rain during the heading and anthesis period, it can contract Fusarium, commonly known as Fusarium head blight. Affected grain produces a mycotoxin, and once the infection rate exceeds 4%, the wheat is no longer fit for consumption.
The black mould on the wheat, by contrast, was mainly caused by the recent stretch of continuous rain. Whichever mould exceeds the safety threshold in testing, the grain is inedible. Even if it were technically edible, both appearance and flavour would suffer greatly, creating significant difficulties for all subsequent processing. The farmers’ plight needs no further explanation.
V. Urgent Harvesting and Drying
The 10 mu of Abro wheat yielded roughly 5 tonnes of grain. Unlike in previous years, when the kernels had a uniform hardness and a brief drying spell was enough to achieve a good moisture level, this year’s lodging had created such a wide gap in maturity that some grains were hard, others soft, and some still green. That meant a much longer drying period was required, or the stored wheat could develop mould.
Fortunately, Lüwo Farm’s drying yard is well designed: half is open-air and half is covered. During sunny daytime hours, we spread the wheat in the open section, raked it level, and turned it every hour. If rain threatened, we simply pulled the open-air wheat back under the covered side, ensuring efficient drying.
VI. Extreme Weather: Farming Is No Easy Task
We heard that before last year’s wheat harvest, Xiaohei slept in a van for several nights running. During the day, air conditioning across the village drained the voltage, making it impossible to start the water pumps, so he had to run the sprinkler irrigation in the cool of the night to cool and rehydrate the wheat baking under the heat, setting an alarm every half hour to make patrol rounds, barely getting any rest.
Encountering a “harvest-ruining rain” at wheat maturity this year, however, was something Teacher Dahei had never seen in nine years of farming. The damage this rain brought extended well beyond the wheat: the chamomile we had devoted so much effort to picking was mouldy from the excessive humidity and ended up entirely as compost.
One of my reasons for joining Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme was to “shatter the idealised vision of farming.” Over more than two months, I watched the plants change day by day, felt the earth’s vitality rise and fall, observed different cultivation methods, and came to understand that environmental issues are inextricably linked to agriculture, and that human health is inextricably linked to food.
Having lived through this once-in-decades “harvest-ruining rain” firsthand, I truly understood how hard it is to be a farmer. In awe of Teacher Dahei’s strength and composure, I became even more certain of one thing: “Now more than ever, we must practise ecological agriculture.”
All photographs in this article are courtesy of Lüwo Farm
Hu Yanrong, Li Deyue and Lu Dashuai also contributed to this article
Edited by: Ze’en