Shaanxi’s Great Drought: Fruit You Can’t Save, Wheat You Can’t Water
I. Early Blooms
In Xu Yuanlin’s vineyard, global warming shows itself in a steadily earlier messenger bloom. He remembers it clearly: the year before last it was 17 May; last year it was 15 May. He had guessed this year would bring it even earlier, so he arranged for a group of women workers from Yunnan to come on 8 May to trim and shape the flower clusters.
But this year’s climate anomaly exceeded anything he had imagined. In late April and early May, Shaanxi experienced a rare heat wave that forced every flower to open prematurely. The day before Xu Yuanlin spotted the messenger bloom, the local temperature had soared to 39.9 °C.
“In the old days, people scheduled the work. Now the work schedules the people,” he said. In addition to 35 mu (≈667 m²) of Shine Muscat grapes, he also grows 5 mu of kiwifruit. He planned it this way to stagger the pollination windows. But this year the kiwifruit also flowered early, clashing with the grape flowering. Xu Yuanlin urgently hired workers for hand pollination of his kiwifruit. Unsurprisingly, every neighbouring orchard was scrambling for labour. In the end he had to contact women workers from another county, who quoted a steep 240 yuan a day without a second thought.
Mei County is known as China’s kiwifruit capital. It is said that one in every three kiwifruits nationwide comes from Shaanxi, and of every two kiwifruits grown in Shaanxi, one comes from Mei County. Driving west from Xi’an along the Lianhuo Expressway, to the south of the road stretches the broad Wei River valley. By mid-May the wheat is nearly ripe, laid out across the land like great thick blankets of coarse wool. Further west, green patches appear ever more thickly within the blocks of golden yellow — those are the kiwifruit orchards.
Once you reach Mei County, the wheat becomes merely a fleeting speck of green in a sea of kiwifruit orchards. Mei County sits in the heart of the Guanzhong Plain. South of the county seat — from the Wei River to the northern foothills of the Qinling Mountains — kiwifruit orchards stretch in every direction. A first-time visitor from elsewhere can hardly fail to be struck by the sight: rows upon rows of trellises nearly two metres high, draped in deep-green vines and palm-sized leaves. From the top of each trellis, long slender new shoots reach skyward, about a metre in length, supple and fluttering in the wind, as though the kiwifruit vines had raised ten thousand arms.
The soil here is rich, and Mount Taibai provides a steady supply of clear water, creating excellent growing conditions for kiwifruit. Since the 1970s, Mei County has cultivated and promoted kiwifruit; annual output value now exceeds 6 billion yuan, making it the area’s pillar industry.
When I visited Mei County in mid-May, almost everyone was sighing: This year’s weather is far too abnormal — the kiwifruit crop is bound to fall short.
The heat forced the flowers to open too early, and growers vied with one another to pollinate them. But many orchards still suffered what they dread most — “bell-ringing”: buds and pedicels dry out and die, dangling like little bells swaying in the breeze. Beyond the premature flowering and underdeveloped floral organs, a combination of rare drought, strong winds and sandstorms during the flowering period compounded the problem, resulting in poor kiwifruit pollination.
Qi Town, in the south of Mei County, is one of the main kiwifruit-growing areas. A local farmer surnamed Gao grows 40 mu of Xuxiang kiwifruit. “When it was time to pollinate, I couldn’t find anyone. Other people couldn’t even manage their own work in time,” Lao Gao said. His orchard already had weak tree vigour, and without enough workers to mount a rescue, many flowers ended up as “bells”. Even where fruit did set, it was shrivelled, small or misshapen — fruit that won’t hold on through to harvest, only to be culled early.
Orchard farming is capital-intensive; kiwifruit trees take an average of four years from planting to bearing fruit. Lao Gao pays 800 yuan per mu in land rent, and inputs such as pesticides, fertiliser and fruit enlargement agents generally run around 3,500 yuan per mu — a total of 4,300 yuan per mu. Across 40 mu, that comes to over 170,000 yuan. “This year is definitely a loss,” Lao Gao said; the only question is how big.
Another variety in his orchard — Hongyang — did manage to dodge the bullet. This variety flowers earlier, so it missed the May heat altogether. Hongyang is also a comparatively expensive variety. However, Lao Gao has only planted a small amount, not even enough to attract buyers to come and purchase from the orchard, so it makes little difference how well it grows.
Lao Gao also has a row of cherry trees. He and his wife picked me a bagful straight from the branches. The flesh was firm, sweet and tart — a pleasant balance. This year has been a good one for cherries. Although hail around the Qingming period knocked out the first wave of blossoms, and the heat before harvest limited the size of the fruit, the hot, dry weather meant the cherries accumulated more sugar, with a richer flavour. And the very low relative humidity kept aphid populations in check. “Go ahead and eat this year’s cherries with no worries — we’ve used less pesticide,” locals told me.
But for Lao Gao, it was as though he had bet on the wrong horses. His main crops — grapes and Xuxiang kiwifruit — were hit by the heat during pollination, while the varieties he planted less of actually had a good year. More and more people are coming to recognise that diversified planting helps adapt to climate change. But for growers, it also means greater management complexity. With rural labour steadily draining away, focusing on one or two cash crops is already difficult enough. For farmers, adding more varieties and species may be easy to understand in principle but extremely hard to put into practice.
II. Migrant Women Workers, Heatstruck
Mei County has few Shine Muscat growers. Compared with the Yunnan women, who have grown grapes back home for years, the locals are neither skilled nor willing to endure the hardship. So for three years running, Xu Yuanlin has invited the same group of women from Yunnan. These women are like a flock of migratory birds flying north: for three or four months each year they shuttle between Sichuan, Shaanxi, Henan and even Liaoyang, specialising in flower cluster trimming and fruit thinning.
The bosses book them the cheapest red-eye flights. Their husbands are fully supportive of this cross-province labour and even joke about it: not only do they earn more, but if the plane went down, they would bring home 1.2 million in insurance payout.
Cluster trimming is no simple task. A single inflorescence may carry as many as 200 buds. The lateral clusters near the top need to be trimmed away, leaving just over 100 buds, which are given a few days to complete self-pollination. At the tip of each bud, a dense brush of tiny yellow flowers blooms. Because the heat has left the floral organs incompletely developed, growers dip a little gibberellic acid — a plant hormone also known as a growth regulator — onto the clusters to ensure fruit set.
Once the grapes set in little clusters the size of mung beans, fruit thinning begins. This is an exceptionally fiddly job requiring enormous care and patience. Every berry growing upward or downward on each small bunch must be snipped off, leaving only those growing parallel to the surface. The entire cluster is then shaped to taper gradually from top to bottom, so the maturing fruit do not press against one another and split, and the finished bunch looks pleasing to the eye as well.
Pruning standards differ from grower to grower depending on the sales channel. Generally, Shine Muscat flower clusters are trimmed smaller. In an orchard I visited in Chencang District, Baoji, the owner required only four tiers of berries to be kept, because the grapes are destined as premium exports to Dubai. The finished cluster weighs about 600 grams — a graceful handful, fitting neatly in one palm. Naturally, for the women workers this means a longer labour time per cluster.
Last year’s piece rate was 1.1 yuan per trimmed flower cluster, of which 4 jiao went to the labour broker. Last year 17 women worked for ten days in Xu Yuanlin’s vineyard; he paid a total of 110,000 yuan, but the women received only 70,000.
This year the rate has gone up by 1 jiao per cluster. A fast pair of hands can trim a thousand clusters a day; even slower workers manage seven or eight hundred. As long as one is willing to work, taking home a thousand yuan a day is no problem. By comparison, the local women can manage only four hundred. “It’s not about the money,” Xu Yuanlin said. “The key is that flowering lasts only those few days — I can’t afford to wait. A lot of the local women are envious, but they simply can’t do it.”
Xu Yuanlin’s standard is similar to that of most growers: six tiers per cluster, roughly 65 berries, yielding a ripe bunch of about 900 grams. These are typically sold in bulk by middlemen at the field edge, the whole orchard bought outright and taken to supermarkets.
After the women finished trimming the flower clusters in Xu Yuanlin’s vineyard, they moved on to an orchard 40 kilometres away in Tianwang Town to continue their work. I found the group there. They wore loose, breathable long sleeves and trousers, each topped with a bucket hat and a cloth hanging down the back to shield the neck. Unlike the local villagers, who like to cluster together, chatting as they work, the women spread out, each silently pruning a single row of grapes. Small secateurs opened and closed with nimble precision, unhurried and even. The snipped berries pattered onto the plastic mulch film below, like raindrops.
At lunchtime, when they take a short break, they gather together to smoke, drink and dance — a brief release from fatigue, easing the ache in their swollen legs and feet. Even in thirty-seven or thirty-eight-degree heat, they go at it willingly.
“My hometown hasn’t had rain for six months either,” the Yunnan woman chatting with me said. Boreholes and lakes had all dried up. The three others who came with her all had grape vines planted at home; the harvest was still some way off, and it was precisely the time when they needed water — but there was none. “We don’t know what to do; we just keep working.” Their rice paddies dried out, and they couldn’t even plant their corn or peanuts.
The women have their worries, and Xu Yuanlin has a mountain of his own. He frets about the pace of fruit thinning but dares not rush them. He is a technical perfectionist and insists that when thinning fruit, one must keep the mind calm and the breath steady. “Your heart rate needs to stay level,” he says — otherwise the hand movements go awry.
He also worries about them fainting from the heat. Every afternoon this week the temperature has soared to 38 °C. Watching them bundled up head to toe, then dancing under the grape trellises at midday, he is both in awe and afraid.
On 19 May at midday, two women collapsed from heatstroke in the vineyard. Fortunately, they recovered after taking medicine and resting. That evening, Xu Yuanlin put them on a flight back to Yunnan.
III. One Season Amiss, Every Season Amiss
In that same orchard in Tianwang Town, the owner still gets a chill at the thought of the early flowering. In early May he was in Gansu; on the morning of the 1st his brother phoned to say the vines had flowered. That same afternoon he called in every worker from his strawberry patch to trim the flower clusters. He does not know when the messenger bloom first opened, but it must have been several days before 1 May.
His grape development is clearly better than Xu Yuanlin’s: the berries are larger, plumper, with a fresher colour. This is because the orchard sits on the loess plateau, where ventilation is better, so although the vines also flowered early, the overall temperature in the orchard is lower.
Among the handful of grape and kiwifruit orchards I visited in Mei County, even just a few kilometres apart, the state of fruit development could differ markedly.
In other words, although the global climate is shifting, each orchard’s microclimate and the grower’s field management skills can play a crucial mediating role. But compared with the volatility of the weather, these human choices and efforts seem largely a matter of hindsight — at the level of any individual farm, human planning loses to the sky’s decree, and farmers can scarcely predict which adaptation technique will truly work.
Beyond scrambling to weather the immediate crisis, the worry fruit growers rarely voice openly is about the future: after long drought, long rain is sure to follow. They dread especially a downpour during the rapid berry expansion phase — for grapes, that would be fatal.
What’s more, this year’s early flowering means an earlier market date. If the grapes hit shelves by mid-August, watermelon season won’t yet be over, and the grapes will have little competitive edge. And at the height of summer, storing them in cold rooms will only pile up electricity bills. The seasonal calendar is one wrong step, every step wrong. Every grower is grumbling — everything is in chaos. But they also console one another: “Everyone’s in a mess — it’s the weather. Don’t panic.”
Xu Yuanlin had planned to harvest 120,000 clusters this year. Now he can save at most 70,000. After spotting the messenger bloom in early May, he set himself a target of “losing 100,000 yuan.” Two weeks later he said, “At this rate it’ll be 200,000 or more.”
The Tianwang Town orchard, sitting on the loess plateau, enjoys the advantages of better ventilation and lower temperatures, but it also has a drawback: no irrigation infrastructure. The owner must pump water up from the spillway channel of a nearby small reservoir to water the vines. And the few mu of wheat beside the vineyard have been bone-dry since after the New Year, nearly withered now. “There’s nothing to be done. Up on the plateau, you harvest at heaven’s mercy — the wheat money doesn’t even cover the electricity bill.” For the farmer, those few mu of wheat are a family grain plot anyway; whatever they yield is a bonus. The grapes, on the other hand, are the family’s main income for the year.
But if the reservoir runs dry, the vineyard is finished.
IV. The Reservoir Runs Dry
On the morning of 14 May, Xu Yuanlin discovered that even the tap water had been switched off. All he could do for breakfast was scramble eggs in boiled milk. He decided to visit the reservoir himself. The next day we went to Shitouhe Reservoir together. It was a scorching day; the air was bleached white by the fierce sunlight. On the inner face of the dam, the water level was very low. Above the waterline, concentric rings of pale, sandy reservoir floor stretched outward. Only near the dam wall was there any water left; further in lay thick, grey, cement-like silt. The tail end of the reservoir was completely dry, leaving nothing but a snow-white, stony riverbed.
In April, the Shaanxi Provincial Meteorological Bureau issued an alert: this spring’s province-wide average precipitation was the lowest for the same period since 1961, and the average temperature the third highest since 1961.
The reservoir sits in the far south-west of Mei County. The Shitouhe River cuts through the Qinling Mountains from south to north, emerging here and joining the Wei River. The Shitouhe basin is rich in water resources; the Taibai Mountain area through which it flows was once described as “the higher the mountain, the higher the water.” Nongfu Spring has set up a water extraction base on Mount Taibai — the only high-altitude snow-mountain source among its eight water origins — with its headline selling point: “Glacial meltwater at 3,000 metres altitude winds down through mountain gorges and ultimately flows into the intake pipes of the Nongfu Spring Mount Taibai base.”
As far back as the Republican era, the Shaanxi Provincial Water Resources Bureau had envisioned damming the river here to impound water. But this dream was not realised until 1994. Since then, Shitouhe Reservoir has served as the municipal water source for the cities of Xi’an and Baoji, earning the epithet the “Water Tower of Guanzhong.”
But according to China Water Resources News, this year’s inflow to Shitouhe Reservoir has dropped by four-tenths compared to the multi-year average. Soil-moisture monitoring stations across the irrigation district report that surface soil water content has fallen below 12%. Meanwhile, sustained high temperatures have sent urban daily water consumption surging by 30%.
At a viewpoint on the reservoir’s edge, several men who had ridden up on motorbikes sat smoking, chattering animatedly about this year’s drought. One said it was an eighty-year event, and they fell to discussing the three-year Great Drought of the Republic’s 18th year. Everyone tried to guess how much water might still be left in the reservoir — perhaps not even a tenth? Villagers recalled how they used to stand on this very spot and sneak a fishing line down into the water; now before them lay nothing but a parched, empty reservoir floor.
“Even Hanzhong has run out of water!” Here they were talking about the Hong-to-Shi Diversion Project — a scheme that draws water from the upper Hongyan River (part of the Han River system) in Taibai County, bores through nearly twenty kilometres of tunnel deep inside the Qinling massif, and delivers the flow by gravity into Shitouhe Reservoir. But this year Hanzhong is enduring its worst drought in a decade. The inflow to the Bao River, into which the Hongyan River discharges, is down by a third compared to the same period in normal years. The Han River can barely sustain itself, so there is no surplus to spare for the lands north of the Qinling.
V. Wheat, Withered Before Its Time
Wheat was a family grain plot to begin with. Even on a reduced harvest, it feeds the household. The hardest hit this year are the large-scale wheat growers.
Of the latter, I found two situations in Mei County. The first was a state-run farm growing over 800 mu of wheat south of the Wei River. Because the land sits on riverbank flats, the water wells are only six metres deep — better irrigation access than the wheat grown on higher ground. But the problem is that the sandy soil here cannot hold water or nutrients. Irrigate sparingly or lavishly, the yield is still poor. In a normal year with timely rains, neighbouring areas bring in over 1,000 jin per mu; here they struggle to reach 700.
This year has been worse still. After the New Year, a few rains fell, but each one merely moistened the surface. During the most recent cloud-seeding operation, one farmer said, “It didn’t even wash the dust off the top of my car.” After March, with the drought looking dire, the farm manager said they had run irrigation a few times, but 800 mu of wheat was simply too vast to cover by irrigation alone.
Across the fields, vast stretches of wheat have yellowing flag leaves, a sign that the crop has entered premature senescence — in severe cases, the plants die outright. The soil at the base of the wheat is too hot to touch in daylight. The manager said production costs run over 500 yuan per mu. At this year’s rate, even pulling in 400 jin per mu, the wheat would fetch only 1.2 yuan a jin — a certain loss.
I asked whether grain growers receive any subsidy. The manager said subsidies go to farmers, not to state-run farms like this one — except for a 20-yuan-per-mu subsidy for wide-row furrow sowing.
Another subsidy covers the “one-spray-three-prevention” programme: mixing insecticide, fungicide and plant growth regulators (such as micronutrient fertiliser and anti-drought agents) into a single application that simultaneously prevents insects, disease and hot dry wind. This year, however, the drought was so severe that conditions were unsuitable for pests or pathogens, so the programme had little practical benefit. Still, because the subsidy is channelled through the agricultural technology station rather than given directly to farmers, the farm had no say in the matter and passively accepted two rounds of spraying.
By comparison, the 90 mu of high-standard farmland the government helped the farm build is proving more useful, because it is fitted with buried sprinkler irrigation. Side by side, it clearly outperforms the reel-type sprinkler irrigators used across most of the remaining wheat fields. Only in the blind spots the sprinklers cannot reach does the wheat stay withered and yellow.
Before 2022, the farm grew wheat mainly for silage, selling it to the neighbouring livestock company — output value could reach 1,200 to 1,500 yuan per mu, far more lucrative than selling grain. But under the current grain-protection policy, that, too, is now prohibited.
On 20 May the year before last, a hailstorm swept through and wiped out the entire crop. The insurance paid out 70,000 yuan. Against production costs of over 400,000 yuan, it was little more than a token gesture.
What people dread most, though, is that if the drought drags on any longer, they may write off the wheat and still be unable to sow the next corn crop — meaning the whole year would have been for nothing.
The loess plateau north of the Wei River presents a very different picture. Locals call it the “Northern Plateau” — the home of Fufeng and Qishan counties, flat and vast, an important commercial grain production base in Guanzhong where wheat reigns, with a scattering of kiwifruit and apple orchards. Where irrigation canals reach, the wheat gets watered; otherwise it is harvest at heaven’s mercy.
The Northern Plateau belongs to a newer irrigation district. Water is drawn from the Baojixia Reservoir to the west through canals and held in small reservoirs built across gullies on the plateau surface. These small reservoirs are the linchpin of drought defence. The large tracts of wheat within their reach, though some twenty to thirty centimetres shorter than usual, have plump, well-filled heads in the normal fresh green, yellowing steadily from the base upwards. If the weather cooperates from here on, the yield should be barely affected.
But the wheat on terraced slopes at higher elevations, beyond the reach of irrigation, has already yellowed across many plots — in farming parlance, heat-induced premature ripening. Yield is expected at three to four hundred jin per mu.
On the whole, the wheat here is in considerably better shape than south of the Wei River. Irrigation infrastructure is only a secondary factor. The fundamental difference is economic: fruit orchards generate tens of thousands of yuan per mu, while grain barely clears a thousand — a stark imbalance. The mindset of the farmers differs accordingly. Fruit growers spare no expense on water and electricity to save their crop. But wheat farmers flinch at the water and electricity bills every single time they irrigate.
“The more grain you grow, the poorer you get.” In a year of such drought, this saying cuts all the more painfully.
Harvest is twenty days away. Now the farmers dread two things: hot dry wind, which accelerates the senescence of the wheat and brings premature yellowing; and a heavy downpour, because the roots of prematurely senesced wheat absorb a flood of water that bursts the cells, killing the plants outright — locals call it wheat “choking to death.”
In the days after I left Baoji, the area remained trapped in thirty-eight or thirty-nine-degree heat. In mid-May, parts of Baoji suspended industrial water supply and rationed household use to scheduled hours. On 21 May — the Grain Full solar term — Mei County issued an orange-level heat alert, with local temperatures expected to reach 40 °C.
Everyone is waiting for rain, yet afraid it will be too little, too much, or too long.
Unless otherwise noted, all photographs were taken by the author
Editor: Tianle