Shaanxi Drought: Fruit beyond saving, wheat left parched
I. Flowers in Early Bloom
Global warming, in Xu Yuanlin’s orchard, manifests as the messenger flower blooming earlier and earlier. He remembers clearly: the year before last it was 17 May, and last year it was 15 May. Expecting it to be even earlier this year, he had arranged for a group of female workers from Yunnan to arrive on 8 May to prune the flowers and trim the clusters.
However, the degree of climatic anomaly this year exceeded his imagination. Shaanxi experienced rare high temperatures in late April and early May, forcing all the flowers to bloom prematurely. Just the day before Xu Yuanlin saw the messenger flower, the local temperature had reached 39.9°C.
“In the past, people planned the work; now, the work plans the people,” he said. In addition to 35 mu of Shine Muscat grapes, he also grows 5 mu of kiwifruit. This arrangement was intended to stagger the pollination periods. This year, however, the kiwifruit also bloomed early, coinciding with the grapes. Xu Yuanlin urgently sought workers for hand-pollination of the kiwifruit. Unsurprisingly, all the neighbouring orchards were competing for labour. Eventually, he had to contact female workers from another county, who demanded a high price of 240 yuan per day.
Mei County is known as China’s home of the kiwifruit. It is said that one in three kiwifruits in China comes from Shaanxi, and half of those from Shaanxi are grown in Mei County. Driving from Xi’an, heading west along the Lianhuo Expressway, the vast floor of the Wei River valley lies to the south. In mid-May, as the wheat nears maturity, it spreads across the land like a thick, neat blanket. As one travels west, green patches appear more frequently amidst the bright yellow, marking the kiwifruit orchards.
By the time one reaches Mei County, the wheat is reduced to fleeting accents in a green wilderness. Situated in the heart of the Guanzhong Plain, the area south of the county town—stretching from the Wei River to the northern foothills of the Qinling Mountains—is blanketed in kiwifruit orchards. A first-time visitor cannot help but be struck by the sight: rows of trellis frames nearly two metres high, covered in deep green branches and palm-sized leaves. From the tops of the frames, slender new shoots about a metre long reach upwards, supple and waving in the breeze, like thousands of arms belonging to the kiwifruits.
The soil here is fertile, with a constant supply of clear water from the Taibai Mountains, providing an ideal environment for kiwifruit. Since the 1970s, Mei County has cultivated and promoted kiwifruit; today, the annual output value has surpassed 6 billion yuan, making it a pillar industry for the region.
When I arrived in Mei County in mid-May, almost everyone was sighing: The weather has been too abnormal this year; kiwifruit yields will definitely drop.
High temperatures forced the flowers to bloom early, and farmers scrambled to pollinate them. Yet, many orchards still suffered from the dreaded “ringing bells”—where flower buds and stems wither and die, hanging from the trees like bells swaying in the wind. Besides the premature blooming and under-developed reproductive organs, the combination of rare drought, strong winds, and dust storms during the flowering period led to poor pollination.
In Qi Town in the south of Mei County, one of the main cultivation areas, a farmer named Lao Gao grows 40 mu of Xuxiang kiwifruit. “I couldn’t find anyone when it was time to pollinate. Everyone was too busy with their own crops,” Lao Gao said. His orchard already had weak tree vigour, and without enough workers to “rescue” the crop, many flowers turned into “ringing bells”. Even those that did fruit were shrivelled, small, or deformed; such fruit cannot be sustained and must be culled early.
Fruit farming is a high-investment industry; it takes an average of four years for a kiwifruit sapling to bear fruit. Lao Gao pays 800 yuan per mu in land rent, and inputs for pesticides, fertilisers, and growth regulators typically cost around 3,500 yuan per mu. Together, that is 4,300 yuan per mu, which for 40 mu totals over 170,000 yuan. “I’ll definitely lose money this year,” Lao Gao said; it is only a question of how much.
Another variety in the orchard—Hongyang—managed to escape. This variety blooms early and was not affected by the high temperatures in early May. Hongyang is also a more expensive variety. However, Lao Gao grew very few Hongyang trees—not even enough to attract wholesalers to the orchard—so their healthy growth was of little use.
Lao Gao also has a row of cherry trees. He and his wife picked a full bag for me. The flesh was firm, with a pleasant sweet and sour taste. This year has been a good year for cherries. Although hail around the Qingming Festival knocked out the first wave of blossoms, and high temperatures before harvest limited the size of the fruit, the heat and drought increased the accumulated sugar, enhancing the flavour. Furthermore, the very low relative humidity limited the proliferation of aphids. “You can eat this year’s cherries without worry; fewer pesticides were used,” locals told me.
But for Lao Gao, it felt like he had placed his bets on the wrong horses. His main crops, grapes and Xuxiang kiwifruit, hit high temperatures during pollination, while the varieties he grew in smaller quantities fared well. Although more people are realising that diversified planting helps adapt to climate change, for fruit farmers, it also means increased management difficulty. With the loss of rural labour, focusing on just one or two cash crops is already a struggle. For farmers, adding more varieties is easier said than done.
II. Heat-Stricken Migrant Women
Not many people in Meixian grow Shine Muscat. Compared to the Yunnan workers who had been growing grapes in their hometowns for years, the locals were neither as skilled nor as capable of enduring the hardship. Consequently, for three years, Xu Yuanlin has invited the same group of women from Yunnan. Like a flock of migratory birds flying north, they spend three or four months every year shuttling between Sichuan, Shaanxi, Henan, and even Liaoyang, specialising in pruning and thinning grape clusters.
The bosses book the cheapest red-eye flights for them. Their husbands are also very supportive of this cross-provincial work, even joking that not only do they earn more money, but if the plane were to crash, they would earn a 1.2 million yuan insurance payout for the family.
Pruning the clusters is no simple task. A single flower cluster can have as many as 200 buds. The upper secondary clusters must be clipped away, leaving around 100 buds to undergo self-pollination over a few days. At the tip of each bud bloom tiny, dense yellow flowers like miniature brushes. Due to incomplete development of the floral organs caused by high temperatures, grape growers apply gibberellic acid (a plant hormone, also known as a growth regulator) at this stage to ensure fruit set.
Once the grapes form clusters of grains as small as mung beans, the thinning begins. This is a tedious job requiring immense care and patience. Grapes growing upwards or downwards in each small cluster must be clipped, leaving only those growing in a parallel direction. Furthermore, they must shape the entire cluster into a silhouette that gradually narrows from top to bottom; this ensures that as the fruit grows, the grapes do not crowd and split, and they look more appealing for sale.
Depending on the sales channel, each grower has different pruning requirements. Generally, Shine Muscat clusters are pruned to be on the smaller side. In an orchard I visited in the Chencang District of Baoji, because the owner produces premium grapes for export to Dubai, he requires that only four layers of fruit be left. This results in a finished bunch weighing about 600g, fitting perfectly in the palm of a hand. For the workers, however, this means longer labour per cluster.
Last year, the pay for pruning one flower cluster was 1.1 yuan, of which 0.4 yuan went to the middleman foreman. Last year, 17 women came to Xu Yuanlin’s orchard and worked for 10 days; Xu paid a total of 110,000 yuan, but the women only received 70,000 yuan.
This year, the pay per cluster has risen by 0.1 yuan. The fastest workers can prune a thousand clusters a day, while the slower ones manage seven or eight hundred. If they are willing to work hard, earning a thousand yuan a day is not impossible. In contrast, local women can only manage four hundred clusters. “It’s not about the money; the key is that flowering only lasts a few days, and I can’t afford to wait,” Xu Yuanlin said. “Many local women are envious, but they simply can’t do it.”
Xu Yuanlin’s requirements are similar to most growers: leave six layers per cluster, roughly 65 grains. Once ripe, the fruit weighs about 900g and is typically bought in bulk directly from the field by middlemen to be sold to supermarkets.
After finishing the work in Xu Yuanlin’s orchard, the women moved to another orchard in Tianwang Town, 40 kilometres away. It was there that I met them. They wore loose, breathable long-sleeved shirts and trousers, each with a bucket hat and a cloth draped over the back of their necks to shade them from the sun. Unlike the local villagers, who prefer to huddle together and chat while they work, these women dispersed, each silently pruning a row of grapes. Their small shears snapped open and shut with nimble precision, steady and unhurried. The sound of the clipped grapes falling onto the plastic mulch was a rhythmic pitter-patter, like falling rain.
During a brief midday break, they gather to smoke, drink, and dance, briefly releasing their exhaustion and easing the swelling in their legs. Even in temperatures of 37 or 38 degrees, they do this tirelessly.
“It hasn’t rained in my hometown for six months either,” a Yunnan worker told me. The tube wells and lakes had all dried up. Three others who came with her also grow grapes; they are still a way off from the market, and now is when they need water most, but they can’t irrigate. “We don’t know what to do, so we just let it be.” The rice has died from drought, and the maize and peanuts cannot be planted.
While the women have their worries, Xu Yuanlin has plenty of his own. He is anxious about the progress of the fruit thinning, but he dares not push them. He is a technical purist, stressing that one must be calm and composed when thinning fruit: “Your heart rate must remain steady.” Only then will the movements of the hand remain precise.
Another reason for his caution is the fear that they might faint from the heat. For the past week, afternoon temperatures have peaked at 38°C every day. Seeing them wrapped up tightly, dancing under the grape trellises at noon, he felt both admiration and fear.
At noon on 19 May, two workers fainted from heatstroke in the orchard. Fortunately, they recovered after taking medicine and resting. That evening, Xu Yuanlin sent them on a flight back to Yunnan.
III. A Season of Compounding Errors
In the aforementioned vineyard in Tianwang Town, the owner still feels a sense of dread when recalling the early flowering. In early May, while he was in Gansu, his brother told him on the morning of the 1st that the vines had bloomed. That afternoon, he called all the workers from the strawberry fields to begin pruning the flowers. He didn’t know exactly when the messenger flowers had appeared, but it was certainly a few days before May 1st.
His grapes are in visibly better condition than Xu Yuanlin’s: larger, plumper, and more vibrantly coloured. This is because the vineyard is situated on the plateau, where ventilation is better; thus, despite the early bloom, the overall temperature remained relatively low.
Among the few grape and kiwifruit orchards I visited in Mei County, there were striking differences in fruit development even between sites separated by only a few kilometres.
In other words, while the global climate is changing, the microclimate of each vineyard and the farmer’s field management techniques can play a crucial regulatory role. Yet, compared to the volatility of the climate, these human choices and efforts often seem like exercises in hindsight—at the micro-level of individual farms, nature’s plan outweighs man’s, and it is difficult for farmers to predict which adaptation techniques will truly be effective.
Beyond simply trying to survive the current crisis, there is a worry the farmers are reluctant to voice: the belief that a long drought must be followed by heavy rain. They are particularly terrified of rain during the rapid fruit-swelling phase, which would be fatal for the grapes.
Furthermore, since flowering occurred early this year, the harvest will inevitably be brought forward. If they hit the market in mid-August, they will still be competing with the watermelon season, leaving the grapes less competitive. Moreover, as this is the peak of the heat, storing them in cold storage would drive up electricity costs. When it comes to the solar terms, once the timing is off, it is a domino effect of errors. Every grower complains that everything has gone haywire. Yet they comfort one another: “Everyone is in the same boat; it’s the climate. Don’t be afraid.”
Xu Yuanlin had originally planned to harvest 120,000 bunches of grapes this year; now, he can save 70,000 at most. After seeing the messenger flowers in early May, he set a target of “losing 100,000 yuan”. Half a month later, he said, “Now it looks like it will be more than 200,000.”
The vineyard in Tianwang Town, being on the plateau, benefits from better ventilation and lower temperatures, but it has its drawbacks: there are no irrigation facilities. The owner must pump water from the spillway of a nearby small reservoir to irrigate the grapes. Meanwhile, the few mu of wheat bordering the vineyard have been parched since the Lunar New Year and are now nearly yellowed and withered. “There’s no helping it; on the plateau, we’re at the mercy of the weather. The cost of electricity would be more than the wheat is worth.” For the farmers, these few mu of wheat are merely subsistence crops—they will take whatever they can get. The grapes, however, are their primary income for the year.
But if the reservoir runs dry, the vineyard is finished.
IV. Dried-up Reservoirs
On the morning of 14 May, Xu Yuanlin discovered that even his domestic tap water had stopped running, leaving him with nothing but boiled milk and eggs for breakfast. He decided he had to see the reservoir for himself. The following day, we travelled to the Shituhe Reservoir together. It was a scorching day, and the air had turned a pale, bleached white under the intense sunlight. The water level on the inner side of the dam was critically low; above the waterline, the reservoir bed stretched out in concentric rings of yellow sand. Only the area closest to the dam held some water; a little further in, there was thick, grey silt resembling cement. The tail end of the reservoir had dried up completely, leaving behind nothing but a stark white, stony riverbed.
In April, the Shaanxi Provincial Meteorological Bureau issued a warning: average precipitation across the province this spring was the lowest for the same period since 1961, while average temperatures were the third highest since 1961.
The reservoir is located at the southwestern edge of Mei County. The Shituhe River cuts through the Qinling Mountains from south to north before flowing out and merging into the Wei River. The Shituhe basin is naturally water-rich; the Taibai mountain area it passes through was once described as a place “where the water is as abundant as the mountains are high”. Nongfu Spring established a water extraction base in the Taibai Mountains, making it the only high-altitude snowy mountain source among its eight primary water sites. Their main selling point is that “glacial meltwater from 3,000 metres above sea level meanders down mountain streams, eventually flowing into the Nongfu Spring Taibai Mountain base extraction pipes”.
As early as the Republican era, the Shaanxi Provincial Water Resources Bureau had dreamed of damming the river to store water. However, this dream was not realised until 1994. From that point on, the Shituhe Reservoir became the primary source of domestic water for the two major cities of Xi’an and Baoji, earning it the reputation as the “Water Tower of Guanzhong”.
However, according to the China Water Resources Newspaper, runoff into the Shituhe Reservoir has decreased by 40% this year compared to average levels. Data from irrigation soil moisture monitoring stations show that surface soil moisture content has dropped below 12%. Simultaneously, the prolonged heatwave has caused daily urban water demand to surge by 30%.
At a viewpoint by the reservoir, a few male villagers who had arrived on motorbikes stood smoking, chatting animatedly about this year’s drought. One suggested it was a once-in-eighty-years event, leading the group to discuss the three-year great drought of the 18th year of the Republic. They speculated on how much water remained in the reservoir—perhaps less than a tenth? The villagers recalled days when they could stand in this very spot and cast a fishing line to steal a few fish; now, there was only the desiccated bed before them.
“Even Hanzhong has run out of water!” they exclaimed. They were referring to the Yinhong Jishi Project, which extracts water from the upper reaches of the Hongyan River in the Han River system within Taibai County, channeling it through a nearly 20-kilometre tunnel bored through the heart of the Qinling Mountains to flow naturally into the Shituhe Reservoir. But this year, Hanzhong suffered its worst drought in nearly a decade. The flow of the Bao River, fed by the Hongyan, has decreased by a third compared to the same period in average years. The Han River barely had enough for its own needs, leaving no surplus to be diverted to the regions north of the Qinling Mountains.
V. The Premature Decline of Wheat
Wheat was originally grown for subsistence. Even with a reduced harvest, there is usually enough to feed a family. This year, however, those who farm wheat on a large scale have been the hardest hit.
In Mei County, I encountered two such cases. One was a state-run farm with over 800 mu of wheat planted south of the Wei River. Because it is river-beach land, the wells are only six metres deep, offering better irrigation conditions than the wheat planted on higher ground. The problem, however, is that the sandy soil cannot retain water or fertiliser. Whether watered heavily or sparingly, the yields remain poor. In years of favourable weather, while other areas might produce over 1,000 jin, this farm manages only 700.
This year has been even worse. The few rains after the Lunar New Year barely dampened the surface of the soil. Following a recent attempt at artificial rainfall, one person remarked, “It didn’t even wash the dust off my car roof.” By March, the drought had become critical. The manager of the state farm said that although they had watered the crops several times, the 800-mu area was simply too vast for irrigation to keep pace.
Vast swathes of the wheat’s flag leaves have already turned yellow and withered, a sign of premature senescence that, in severe cases, leads to the death of the plant. During the day, the soil at the base of the wheat is scorching to the touch. The manager noted that the cost of producing wheat is over 500 yuan per mu; if the yield falls to 400 jin this year, selling at 1.2 yuan per jin, they will inevitably suffer a loss.
I asked whether there were subsidies for grain production. The manager explained that subsidies are granted to individual farmers, not state-run farms (with the exception of a wide-furrow sowing subsidy of 20 yuan per mu).
There is another subsidy for “one spray, three preventions”—a process where insecticides, fungicides, and plant growth regulators (such as micro-fertilisers and drought-resistant agents) are mixed into a single application to protect against pests, disease, and the “dry hot wind”. However, because it has been so dry this year, the conditions for pests and diseases to thrive are absent, making the treatment largely pointless. Yet, as the subsidy is paid to the agricultural technology station and farmers have no say in the matter, the farm was forced to undergo the process twice.
By comparison, the 90 mu of “high-standard farmland” constructed by the government has proven more effective, as it is equipped with underground sprinkler irrigation. This has turned out to be far more efficient than the reel sprinklers used in most of the other wheat fields. Even so, the wheat remains yellowed in the “blind spots” where the water cannot reach.
Before 2022, the farm primarily grew wheat for silage to sell to nearby livestock companies, with a value of 1,200 to 1,500 yuan per mu—far more profitable than selling it as grain. However, under current grain security policies, this is now prohibited.
On 20 May the year before last, the area was hit by hail, resulting in a total crop failure. Insurance paid out 70,000 yuan, but compared to the planting costs of over 400,000 yuan, it was a mere drop in the ocean.
Moreover, there is a lingering fear that if the drought persists, it won’t just be the wheat that is lost; the subsequent maize crop may not be sowable at all, rendering the entire year’s labour a waste.
North of the Wei River, on the loess plateau, the scene is quite different. Known locally as the “North Yuan“, encompassing Fufeng and Qishan counties, this is a vast, flat region and a vital commercial grain base for the Guanzhong area. It is dominated by wheat, with scattered kiwi and apple orchards. Where there are irrigation canals, the wheat can be watered; otherwise, farmers must rely on the whims of the weather.
The North Yuan is part of a new irrigation district. Water is diverted from the Baoji Gorge Reservoir in the west via canals and stored in small reservoirs built within the valley gullies of the plateau. These small reservoirs are the linchpin of drought resistance. The vast wheat fields they serve are twenty to thirty centimetres shorter than in previous years, but the ears are plump and the colour is a healthy green, yellowing naturally and gradually from the roots upwards. Provided the weather remains stable, yields should remain largely unaffected.
However, wheat planted on the high terraces cannot be irrigated, and many plots have already turned yellow. In agricultural parlance, this is known as “forced ripening by high temperature”, and yields are expected to drop to three or four hundred jin per mu.
Overall, the condition of the wheat here is far better than south of the Wei River. Irrigation is only a secondary factor. The fundamental difference lies in the economic disparity: fruit trees generate over 10,000 yuan per mu, while grain generates barely a thousand. This creates a profound imbalance in the farmers’ mindsets. While fruit growers spare no expense on water and electricity to save their crops, wheat farmers agonise over the cost of every single irrigation.
“The more grain you grow, the poorer you become.” In a year of severe drought, these words carry a particular weight of sorrow.
Harvest is only twenty days away. Now, farmers fear both the “dry hot wind”—which accelerates the senescence of the wheat plants, causing them to yellow prematurely—and heavy rain. If the prematurely aged roots absorb too much water, the cells can “burst”, killing the plant rapidly—a phenomenon the locals call “wheat choking to death”.
In the days after I left Baoji, temperatures remained high, hovering around 38 or 39 degrees. By mid-May, industrial water use was suspended in parts of Baoji, and domestic water was supplied on a scheduled basis. On 21 May, the day of *Xiaoman* (Grain Buds), Mei County issued an orange high-temperature warning, with local temperatures expected to reach 40°C.
Everyone is waiting for the rain, yet they fear it may be too light, too heavy, or last too long.
Photos taken by the author unless otherwise noted
Editor: Tianle