Autumn Harvest in Six North China Counties: How to “Hold an Umbrella” Under Unending Rain?
Corn is not the only crop affected; other cash crops have suffered too, and the economic losses borne by those farmers may be even greater.
This article documents the predicament and struggle of North China’s farmers under this year’s unseasonable, unending autumn rains. The climate has changed, yet the farmers, large and small, fighting back however they can, still lack an umbrella to shield them from risk.
I. Harvesters Unable to Enter the Fields
In two months he has seen the sun rarely. The autumn rains seemed never-ending, stretching from September into October. By now the soil has absorbed all the water it can hold, and standing water from the day before still lingers in the lower ground. Since September, Henan has experienced eight rounds of widespread, significant rainfall, with an average of 27.5 rainy days—more than any comparable period since records began in 1961. In Handan, Xingtai and other parts of Hebei, the rain also fell on and off for more than twenty consecutive days.
By his years of experience, corn is planted in June and harvested in September, after which wheat is sown. Now this autumn’s rains have thrown that rhythm into disarray—already October, and some households in the village still have not brought in their corn. Elder Li said the corn’s growth cycle lasts only 115 days, but because of the continuous rain, this year’s growing period has been stretched to 140 or 150 days. If the harvest is delayed any longer, the stalks will topple, the straw will have stiffened, and once chopped and ploughed back into the soil, it will decompose poorly.
In some areas corn simply matures later. In central Hebei it is not until mid-October. In Handan, in southeastern Hebei, officials from Jiecheng Town in the Fengfeng Mining District told us on 16 October that due to elevation and local climate, the corn here also grows and reaches harvest later. But corn left sitting in unventilated fields, soaked by the rain, continues to mould and can even begin to sprout.
Jiecheng Town has 8,000 mu of corn planted. Zhao Feng (pseudonym), a local, has contracted 1,000 mu. Foodthink observed at his field that a good deal of the corn had been struck by Penicillium and ear rot. The mould spread further from kernels already pecked and bored into by birds and insects.
The corn in the fields cannot wait any longer. Yet growers are struggling to harvest on time. Large machinery such as wheeled harvesters drives onto waterlogged land, compacting the soil; even when operators press on, the machines may slip or sink into the mud and become immobile.
In Quzhou, Handan, a villager of Xiaoyizhuang Village who has contracted over 200 mu tried to drive a harvester into his field, but managed only a small patch before the operation had to be abandoned; the field was left scarred with a mess of wheel tracks. In Zhuzhuang Village, Shangqiu, some farmers have stationed a tractor beside their fields at the ready, prepared to rescue a stuck harvester.
Zhao Feng, the 1,000-mu grower in Jiecheng Town, Fengfeng Mining District, owns two tracked harvesters. These are lighter and distribute their weight across tracks rather than wheels, so they can better traverse flooded ground. But he still cannot harvest—the tractor used to collect the cobs cannot get into the fields. With so much land, many plots run tens or even hundreds of metres deep, making it impractical to carry corn by hand or by three-wheeled cart. For Zhao Feng, 1,000 mu would require nine or ten labourers working continuously for ten to fifteen days. But on 17 October, only days after the rain had paused, it began again. He has not yet found a window in which to start the harvest.
Elder Li in Shangqiu also harvested just over two mu by hand. Because the ground was sodden, the three-wheeled cart would sink into the mud, so he cut down corn stalks and spread them across the ground as a makeshift road before driving the cart into his field. But hand-picking corn is slow and exhausting. “You can pick an acre’s worth on the first day,” Elder Li said, “but the next day you can’t manage a full acre anymore—you get only half.”
In the end, Elder Li did call in a harvester. Much of the corn still left on his remaining four mu had already moulded, and he had to get it in before it was too late.
To rush the harvest, many farmers have paid far more than in previous years. In Mengcun, Xiuwu County, Jiaozuo, Henan, villager Cheng Xiaolin is one of the local large-scale grain farmers and has joined with other large-scale growers to form a grain production cooperative. He said hiring a local harvester still qualifies for a subsidy, but all local machines are wheeled and unsuited to wet soil. Many farmers would rather forgo the subsidy and opt for a tracked harvester brought in from elsewhere.
In Xiaoyizhuang Village, Feixiang District, Quzhou, Hebei, farmers cannot even claim a harvest subsidy. One villager grabbed the two brief rain breaks before the Mid-Autumn Festival to race-harvest his corn; the hire charge for farm machinery was eighty yuan per mu, twenty to thirty yuan more than usual. Many villagers simply kept waiting—even with a wheeled harvester parked at the edge of the field—fearing it would damage the soil, they chose to leave the corn standing.
By 18 October, whether in the Fengfeng Mining District to the west of Handan or in the larger grain-growing counties of Quzhou and Feixiang to the east, Foodthink found that those who had managed to get their corn in were mainly smallholders, carrying out sack after sack and bundle after bundle by hand. The large-scale growers with hundreds of mu to their name, who depend entirely on harvesters, had yet to bring in a single cob.
II. Too Wet to Dry, Too Damp to Machine—The Cobs Mould and Sprout Regardless
Yet corn cobs freshly picked from the field may carry even more moisture than they did standing in the ground. If left unspread and unprotected from the damp, they can mould within a single night.
Large enterprises such as Sinograin accept only “dry grain”—corn kernels with a moisture content below 14%. But freshly harvested corn still holds 20 to 30% moisture. In normal years, Henan farmers can spread their threshed kernels flat on open ground and, within two days, dry them sufficiently.
But in the current wet spell, a stable drying yard with a hard, sealed surface is a luxury for most smallholders. On bare earth or brick, cobs are drawn to ground-level moisture and can heat up, decompose, even ferment. Rain may still fall from above, and spreading a plastic sheet to shelter the crop traps the damp inside. One online commentator summed it up: “Leave it uncovered and it sprouts; cover it and it grows mould.”
Larger drying spaces are even scarcer. In Zhuzhuang Village, Shangqiu, growers who contract over 100 mu can only shuffle their corn back and forth across whatever limited clear ground they have. Grain stations and traders who buy at scale must run a front-end loader through the cobs every day to turn them over.
Uncle Chen in Xicai Village, Xian County, Cangzhou, Hebei, has contracted 300 mu and maintains a dedicated drying yard—a stroke of “luck” compared to others. After the National Day holiday the rains lasted only about a week, not nearly as long as in Handan or Henan, and the several thousand jin of corn he had already brought in were undamaged. But the brick sub-base of his yard was saturated, with bricks sinking into the mud and large vehicles veering erratically across it; the drying operation was halted. He and his wife rushed to hire workers to pour a concrete surface. By 17 October the work was barely a third done, and it had already cost them over 100,000 yuan.
In most of the villages Foodthink visited on this trip, villagers pile corn cobs into cylindrical storage bins (called duns), stacked in their courtyards or on rooftops. Uncle Chen took a different path, buying steel pipes and wire mesh to build rectangular corn racks whose bases can also be raised off the ground for ventilation. He told us proudly that his corn suffered little insect damage, so rain had difficulty seeping in through the chewed skin of the kernels. He also believed his harvested corn had fully completed grain-filling and reached maturity, and that his storage methods were more careful. All of this helped his corn resist mould.
But even in a rack identical to Uncle Chen’s, in another town in the Fengfeng Mining District west of Handan, corn buyer Li Jun’s cobs moulded within days. He had rented a concrete yard and a large warehouse dedicated to storing corn, and only this year had spent money erecting corn racks. Rain lasts longer in Fengfeng, and its lower latitude compared with Cangzhou means corn matures earlier there. They had no choice but to rush to thresh the cobs and spread the kernels on the ground to dry.
From 13 October the skies cleared. They spread corn kernels on the concrete yard for three straight days and moisture was finally dropping when, on the 17th, the weather forecast warned of rain again the next day. They spent the whole day racing to harvest. “If we can’t get it in by tomorrow, all this effort will have been for nothing.”
Sun-drying is hard; machine-drying is harder still. Smallholders lack drying equipment and have only two options: sell freshly harvested “wet” cobs or kernels to a grain middleman at a steep discount, or dry them at home as best they can and sell them as dry kernels—even after deducting the weight of the corncob and residual moisture, the price is better that way. Moreover, spot corn prices fluctuate, so farmers also hold back grain, hoping to fetch a higher price later than at autumn harvest, sometimes keeping it through the twelfth lunar month.
Li Jun has thought about buying a dryer, but a unit costs at least a hundred thousand yuan, the larger models over a million. His rented premises are far from secure, so he dares not make such an investment on a whim.
III. Surviving Drought-Led Yield Losses—Enduring the Mould’s Blow to Income Is Harder Still
From early July to early August, Henan was engulfed in widespread high-temperature drought. This period coincided with the corn’s critical flowering and grain-filling stage—the stretch from when the tassels emerged and pollination occurred through to full kernel maturity. To ensure plentiful, plump kernels with a full grain-filling, the crop needs water more than anything. Farmers waited for rain, but it never came. To combat the drought, they had no choice but to pump ceaselessly from powered wells to irrigate their corn.
In Mengcun, Jiaozuo, farmers watered every two weeks or less—four or five times in total. Luckily the fields there had relatively good irrigation access. But on some plots the water table in the wells was too deep, and at most they could manage two or three waterings early on. As a result, large growers with several hundred mu could keep up with watering in the early weeks, but after two or three rounds they simply could not keep pace.
Much of Hebei draws on deep groundwater wells. Zhao Feng’s Jiecheng Town in Handan’s Fengfeng Mining District sits at an elevation of over 200 metres: water is pumped up from a powered well and then pumped again onto the fields, with electricity costing 60 yuan an hour—yet it still cannot irrigate even a single mu thoroughly. Li Jun from Xinpo Town in Handan also recalled the drought: the whole village was parched, and people began drawing water from two large ponds of nearly 50 mu each, until the fish farmers who stocked them protested and they had to stop.
“The stalks grew tall—bare, with no cobs at all, and the leaves all curled at the edges.” Zhao Feng was driven to helpless laughter by the stunted “runts” of corn in his fields. He had paid the electricity bills to water them, but on the higher-lying plots, he estimated yields would fall to less than half of last year’s.
Even for farmers like Elder Li in Zhuzhuang Village, Zhecheng County, Shangqiu, who had irrigated promptly and come through the drought smoothly, the corn had already begun to mould while still standing in the field. “It doesn’t weigh anything on the scale anymore.”
Harvesting rotted stalks posed its own difficulties. A harvester’s cutting head sits at a certain height; if the stalks rot from the base, the toppled corn cannot all be gathered in. Elder Li said he had originally expected quite high yields—normally 90% of the crop came in—but this year he managed only 50 to 60%; the rest was scattered across the ground.
Mouldy corn is also hard to sell: grain processors have strict limits on mould rates. Corn with too much mould cannot even be used as feed grain. Some villagers picked out only the sound cobs by hand, leaving the mouldy ones still attached to the stalks to be ploughed back into the soil.
In the end, Elder Li’s four-plus mu in Henan yielded barely 3,000 jin of corn kernels—an average of six or seven hundred jin per mu, half of a normal year’s output.
IV. Low Grain Prices Add Insult to Injury
But the mould damage has been so severe that even the good corn painstakingly harvested before the rains can no longer fetch a decent price. Elder Li in Shangqiu, Henan, who raced to harvest just under 3,000 jin of corn, could sell it for barely over 30 fen a jin. The four mu had not even earned him 1,000 yuan in total. The loss stung.
Another farmer interviewed in Shangqiu said that all the corn he had hand-picked from his 2.4 mu went at just 20 fen per jin, earning him only 200 yuan—a tenth of what he would have made in a normal year.
For smallholders like Elder Li, the costs of farming are low beyond labour, and annual farm income runs to just a few thousand yuan anyway. Even after a devastating loss, they can still rely on remittances from children working elsewhere to get by.
But large-scale contracted growers who farm conventionally face far higher costs: land rent alone runs 600 to 1,000 yuan per mu, and on the higher end as much as 1,300 yuan. Faced with natural disasters and market volatility, their operational risks are amplified many times over.
Cheng Xiaolin, who contracts 900 mu, worked out that after this year’s yield losses he is losing 100 yuan per mu. In a normal year, a large-scale grower might earn only a few hundred yuan per mu at best. The thousand-mu grower in Jiecheng Town, Fengfeng Mining District, Hebei, put his wish for the year plainly: sell the corn, settle the land rent and seed-and-fertiliser costs with the farmers in full, and have perhaps 80,000 or 100,000 yuan left over—enough to sustain this year’s livelihood.
It is not only farmers who struggle to earn: the risk of mould travels downstream along the supply chain, and buyers may end up losing money too. Li Jun purchased corn in Nanyang at 58 fen per jin, but rain fell throughout the journey and the cobs began sprouting inside the truck. By the time they reached their destination, moisture had climbed past 40%—the maximum reading a grain moisture meter can register. In the end, the kernels he had bought at 58 fen were resold at half that price, and the three-truckload trade left him 50,000 yuan out of pocket. Another corn trader in Quzhou County, Hebei, took in several hundred thousand jin of cobs, all of which sprouted. Sell them, and each jin of wet grain would cost him 25 fen in losses; leave them, and the moulding could only worsen.
Now Li Jun’s warehouse holds four grades of corn: relatively sound, 30% mould-damaged, 50% mould-damaged, and 70% mould-damaged. The proportion of the last grade may still be rising.
Amid the volatility, villagers still hold out hope that corn prices will climb. In Quzhou, Hebei, even though every cob in the purchasing station has begun to mould and sprout and the station dares no longer take on more, some villagers still believe this year will “not necessarily” mean a loss: if the price of wet cobs rises to 75 fen per jin, even after discarding a third, they might still make a little. One can only hope this is not merely Ah Q mentality.
V. Year after Year of Disasters, Crops Rotting One after Another
Although there is still a window for sowing winter wheat before the ground freezes, farmers worry that the delay, colliding with dropping temperatures, could cut yields. Cheng Xiaolin explained that the wheat’s “tillering rate”—the number of tillers—would be low, meaning fewer wheat ears. “Where a single wheat seed would normally put out four or five tillers, now it might produce only one. A yield loss is certain.” To compensate, farmers can only buy more seed. “Before, you’d use 25 jin; now you need 40. If the delay stretches longer, even more.”
Farmers in Zhuzhuang Village, Shangqiu, who choose to plant garlic after the corn harvest, are even more frantic with worry. In a normal year, garlic sown at this time would already have put out three or four leaves. But this year they still cannot get it in the ground, and the garlic seed stored at home has already begun to sprout. Agricultural experts say the latest date for sowing garlic is 20 October; failing that, it must go in during November at the very latest. Time has stopped waiting for anyone.
Other crops have also taken a hit. These past few days have coincided with peak fig harvest. Xiao Zhu of Zhuzhuang Village rises after five in the morning to start picking. On 18 October alone he harvested over a thousand jin, but many of the figs had split open. In that single day he threw out two or three hundred jin of spoiled fruit—roughly a full day’s harvest in a normal year. The rain has made it impossible to sell figs as fresh fruit this year; he can only dry them all into dried figs.
It was not until past three in the afternoon that he finally had a spare moment to pump water. After the relentless rain, entering the fig orchard to pick requires knee-high wading boots. At this year’s worst flooding the water nearly topped the boots’ height; a grandmother who had come from the village to help had to go home to change her waterlogged boots before returning to work.
Because Zhuzhuang lies close to Bozhou in Anhui Province—one of the country’s best-known chilli trading centres—many of the large-scale growers in the village contract land to grow cash crops such as traditional Chinese medicinal materials and chillies. These carry far higher growing costs. Atractylodes alone can run over ten thousand yuan per mu to cultivate. Once hit by disasters like those of the past two years, large growers can face losses of hundreds of thousands, even over a million yuan.
Yet the disaster they face each year is never the same. Take last year: Zhuzhuang Village in Shangqiu was hit by an extraordinary downpour. Meteorological stations recorded that from 07:00 on 15 July to 07:00 on 18 July, Shangqiu received an average of 295 millimetres of rainfall; five observation stations exceeded 500 millimetres—nearly half a year’s rain in just three days.
“After last year’s downpour, even the provincial road was underwater, with kids scooping up fish. You couldn’t pump water anywhere—the ditches and the road surface were level with each other. My fig orchard sat submerged for a full six days,” Xiao Zhu said. In the end, many of his fig trees drowned in that flood and had to be dug out.
Many villagers in Zhuzhuang still remember that storm vividly. Although this year has brought no downpour, the unbroken stretch of grey, dripping sky is equally rare. “Last year was a total crop failure. This year there’s still some yield, but it’s more exhausting.”
Years of relentless disasters became the straw that broke many people’s backs, and some have chosen to pull out. This year, land rents in Zhuzhuang have already begun to fall: 1,000 yuan per mu has dropped to 800, and what was 800 has sunk to 600.
VI. Technology and Equipment Follow the Rain Belt North
During these autumn rains, some types of farm machinery previously uncommon in North China—tracked harvesters, grain drying towers—have begun to prove their worth.
Whether in Henan or Hebei, tracked corn harvesters are still rare. Feixiang District in Handan, Quzhou, sits on flat terrain and is a major corn-growing area in Hebei; heavy-duty wheeled combine harvesters have always been the most popular. In Feixiang District alone, the villagers of Xiaoyizhuang have bought fifteen of them. They are powerful, easy to handle, and the farmers’ favourites—capable of threshing the corn while simultaneously chopping the stalks and hauling them away. Although a single unit costs as much as 300,000 yuan, some operators earned back 150,000 in a single year last year. Tracked harvesters, by contrast, have been dismissed by some farmers as inefficient and slow to work. Of all the areas we visited, only the Fengfeng Mining District in Hebei had introduced tracked harvesters two or three years ago—because it sits in mountainous, hilly country with fragmented plots, where a tracked machine with a lower front end is far less likely to tip over when turning at the edges of a field.
Amid the autumn rains, grain drying towers have become a “miracle tool” for farmers trying to save their harvest. Cheng Xiaolin owns the first grain drying tower in Xiuwu County. In 2023, he concluded that the large contracted growers produced too much grain and were unwilling to spread it out to dry—that mechanical drying would be the future. He spent over a million yuan on two towers.
In less than three years, according to information released by Xiuwu County, the county now has 13 drying towers with a combined daily capacity of 1,200 tonnes. Cheng expects even more to appear next year—several operators are already preparing to install them.
But Xiuwu County’s drying capacity remains limited. These past few days, Cheng’s towers have run non-stop around the clock; his workers eat and sleep at the plant, sneaking home only to change clothes. Yet corn rushed in by farmers keeps arriving at the purchasing station in a steady stream. What the warehouse cannot hold is piled in the yard, waiting to be dried as quickly as possible.
Sun Ming, who grows traditional Chinese medicinal materials, saw his drying room put to unexpected use this year—pressed into service for the corn harvest. Of course, a medicinal drying room is designed for drying medicinal herbs; drying corn is not cost-effective. But with this year’s corn so saturated, he has no choice but to make do with what he has to salvage the season. Neighbours have come to him too, asking him to dry their corn.
Stuck indoors by the rain with nothing to do, Sun Ming—a graduate in automation—set about designing a small-scale dryer. He drew up the plans himself, then found workshops nearby to machine the parts with machine tools, spending 3,000 yuan to build a simple dryer. It runs on fuel pellets made from dried corncobs, or directly on firewood, generating hot air to dry the corn.
With his homemade dryer, Sun Ming dried the remaining two or three thousand jin of corn on his own farm. It has not yet truly come into its own this year, though. But it could become a form of self-rescue in the future. Sun Ming thinks that if the weather continues to behave as it did this year, anyone with six to ten mu of land might find it worth investing in a dryer like this.
But these machines remain limited in number across Hebei and Henan, so they have also become a priority for government departments in this year’s disaster-relief efforts to support farmers.
Earlier, the Ministry of Finance, together with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, allocated 484 million yuan in central-government disaster-prevention and relief funds for agricultural production, to support seven affected provinces—including Hebei, Henan and Shaanxi—in accelerating emergency harvesting with farm machinery, drying of wet grain, and draining waterlogged fields. As of 10 October, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs had also coordinated the transfer of 246,300 tracked harvesters to meet demand across the Huang-Huai-Hai region.
At the provincial level, by 15 October, Henan had mobilised nearly 8,000 tracked corn harvesters to relieve the pressure of emergency harvesting, and brought the replacement of headers on tracked grain harvesters into the scope of the agricultural machinery purchase subsidy. It simultaneously deployed 832 regional agricultural machinery service centres and 742 emergency farm-machinery operation teams to conduct urgent harvesting, and published the locations and contact details of all 4,963 drying machines in the province to farmers. A total of 50 million yuan in disaster-relief funds was allocated in stages for drying-machinery subsidies, autumn grain harvest allowances, and machinery coordination.
Hebei has stepped up its emergency farm-machinery response. During the “Three Autumns” season—the busy period of autumn harvesting, sowing and field management—the province expects to deploy 730,000 units of farm machinery, including 220,000 medium and large tractors, 76,000 corn harvesters and 168,000 wheat seeders. It has stockpiled 568 tracked corn harvesters and 1,292 grain drying machines (towers) for emergency use.
And yet, during our field visits in mid-October, not a single farmer in Hebei or Henan reported using machinery dispatched by local authorities or receiving dedicated funding.
Agricultural insurance has also been playing a part. Some farmers who had purchased corn insurance were able to claim some compensation, though not much. Thanks to insurance payouts, Cheng Xiaolin, who lost 100 yuan per mu, has roughly broken even, and some households in Zhuzhuang Village received around a hundred-odd yuan in claims.
The question remains: how many farmers can these measures actually reach, and to what extent can they truly ease the losses inflicted by disaster?
In Lubianqiao Village, Jiaozuo, a villager Foodthink met had sold his entire 2.4 mu of corn for just 200 yuan. Large quantities of corn had moulded in the fields beside the village, yet no agricultural insurance claim had been paid. “The insurance agent said this year’s damage doesn’t qualify as a total crop loss. The villagers and the agent had a big argument, and the man just turned around and walked away. When we called back, he wouldn’t pick up. The power to approve a claim lies with them—if they say it’s not covered, what can we do?” he said.
In farmers’ experience, drought and flooding are the two most common disasters they face. But drought is less feared—pumping water for irrigation can still manage it. Flooding is what terrifies them most. Faced with climate change, the farming knowledge farmers have accumulated over decades is also losing its currency, leaving them with even fewer means of self-rescue. And disasters like these may well recur. Under the unending rain, who can hold an umbrella over the farmers?
Sun Ming, Zhao Feng and Li Jun are pseudonyms in this article
Foodthink members Ling Yu and Yu Yang also contributed to this article
Editor: Tianle