When Extreme Heat Becomes the Norm, These Farmers Choose Another Way of Life (Part 1)

I. Climate Change Through Smallholders’ Eyes: Spring Drought, Soil and Grain Storage

The downpour began on the evening of 17 June, swinging between fierce bursts and light showers, and did not ease until the afternoon of the next day. “After the Spring Festival, we had a few rains, and then it’s been bone dry until now.” For the two months before, Ganjiadian Village in Ziyang, Sichuan — where Yang lives — had received virtually no effective rainfall. Curled-up leaves on the maize stalks told an outsider all about this spring’s drought.

Just the day before the rain came, the local broadcast reported 39°C.

This spring drought was the most immediate sign of climate change Yang had felt in the seven or eight years since returning to the village. In his memory, drought this severe and prolonged had last struck in the 1970s.

After lunch, Yuan Yong borrowed a pair of knee-high boots from Yang Xiuyou and set about getting out to his fields. Yuan Yong is a senior agronomist at Jianyang’s Dongxi Subdistrict Comprehensive Agricultural Service Centre, and serves as agricultural project technical adviser for the Chengdu Home Action Public Welfare Service Centre (hereafter “Home Action”). The purpose of this visit to Yang’s place was mainly to check on the recent condition of his ecological rice crop.

Wading down into Yang Xiuyou’s paddy, Yuan Yong reported the readings from the soil analyser to his Home Action colleagues: “pH value 5.6, temperature 26°C, soil depth about 10 centimetres.” Deeper into the same paddy, he took another reading: pH value 6.4, 26°C. In the adjacent plot, he measured pH value 5.1 and 25°C — that belonged to another villager who had only this year begun growing rice using ecological methods.

For rice, slightly acidic to neutral soil — a pH value in the range of 5.5 to 6.5 — is optimal for absorbing and making use of various nutrients. In conventionally farmed paddies, the use of pesticides and chemical fertilisers tends to drive the soil pH below 5.5. But after three years of ecological cultivation, the pH value of Yang Xiuyou’s soil had shifted markedly.

“The natural recovery process of soil is actually quite fast. Look at that side — just two or three years, and it’s already gone past six. With these baseline figures, you really ought to feel more confident now.” Yang Xiuyou stood at the edge of the paddy bund, listening quietly as Yuan Yong went through the analysis.

This was his third year adopting the climate-friendly rice cultivation techniques promoted by Home Action.

Unlike traditional flood-irrigated rice farming, this method involves planting seedlings on raised beds formed by ridging and channeling the paddy, with water kept only in the channels between the beds to reduce the overall volume of irrigation needed. The ecological approach also stresses using local landrace varieties as much as possible, and practising no-till management with straw mulching: the soil is left as undisturbed as possible, with neither manual labour nor machinery ploughing it, and after transplanting, straw is spread over the field to suppress weeds, build fertility, moderate soil temperature and retain moisture.

The technique insists on no chemical fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides — which sounds almost “backwards”. But its water-saving, drought-tolerant qualities, combined with the savings on agricultural inputs, were enough to win Yang Xiuyou over, even though the first year’s trial had not gone smoothly.

The spring drought of 2023 meant the first rice crop never made it into the ground. To cut his losses, Yang Xiuyou replanted his two mu with soybeans in July, again applying the no-till, straw-mulching ecological approach. That year, powdery mildew took its toll on most of the village’s soybean crop, but Yang Xiuyou’s came in strong. In the end he sold his ecological soybeans at 4 yuan per jin, while conventionally grown soybeans fetched 3 yuan per jin on the market.

“I was going to start at 5 yuan a jin, but then I thought, forget it.”

“Everyone else wants to sell dearer; he wants to sell cheaper,” Yuan Yong teased from the side.

“All it costs me is the seed,” Yang Xiuyou said with a smile.

Last year, the two mu of ecological rice finally came good: the first crop yielded just over 700 jin per mu. After that cutting, new shoots and ears sprouted from the rice stubble, and by autumn he harvested over 100 jin of ratoon rice. He had also planted some maize, more drought-tolerant than rice.

The grain harvested was sealed in plastic bags by Yang Xiuyou and stowed in metal grain bins, meant to last his household a year — apart from the 100-plus jin of ratoon rice, which the birds had all but devoured while it was drying on his rooftop.

“It’s not just villagers in one place who stockpile grain — we’ve come across this in many villages,” said Hu Xiaoping, the head of Home Action. One of the explanations villagers give for not selling their grain, he notes, is tied to climate change. Wary of extreme weather, they worry that the land which grows good rice this year might not be up to it next year. Hu Xiaoping has observed that some of the villagers they work with stock enough grain to feed a family for three or four years.

The villagers’ unease is not unfounded. With climate change, both drought and heatwaves have increased markedly across China’s southwest. In Yang Xiuyou’s village, the spring before last, the drought was so severe the rice could not be transplanted at all. Last year the seedlings did make it into the ground, but the harvest nearly did not come home — after the Start of Autumn, eastern Sichuan was hit by several consecutive days of extreme heat. During the day it was simply too hot to set foot in the fields; many farmers could only go out with lamps after 10 at night to cut their rice. They said they had never known a summer this hot.

Twenty years ago, many people still believed that climate change did not exist — that it was nothing more than a conspiracy spun by politicians. Ten years ago, governments around the world negotiated the landmark Paris Agreement, hoping to keep global warming to no more than 1.5°C by the end of this century. And yet in the past two years alone, every one has been the “hottest on record” — warming above pre-industrial levels exceeding 1.45°C each time. The future is already here. This year, the question on everyone’s lips has become: “What do we do?”

Especially the farmers who live at the mercy of the weather yet feed all of humanity — what should they do?

Hu Xiaoping graduated in Rural Regional Development from China Agricultural University, with deep experience in rural community development, ecological agriculture and local economies. In 2017, he founded Home Action, focusing on agriculture, community governance and the preservation of local culture. As the head of a charity, Xiaoping’s life is split between two parallel worlds of language, occasionally crossing over. Out fundraising and negotiating projects, he speaks Mandarin — sometimes English — and is constantly fielding the same handful of questions from climate philanthropists at home and abroad: How is China cutting its greenhouse gas emissions? What innovative paths are there for rural areas to adapt to climate change?

Back in the village, he switches to the local dialect, chatting with the aunties about the flavour of landrace varieties and the problem of discarded pesticide bags being littered around. Translating between the two discourses — inside and outside the village — while channelling external resources in, is a basic skill for any rural worker. Over the past few years, more and more NGOs have taken root in the countryside, trying to tackle the troubles climate change brings. In the increasingly hot and increasingly dry southwestern provinces, everything has its place — from something as small as fitting fans in the villagers’ activity room to building a micro reservoir.

But in Xiaoping’s view, the key to facing climate change does not lie in converting and conveying language — simply making farmers aware that “climate change” is a thing — but in dismantling the agricultural system that traps them in a climate bind, helping them find a way of living that is in harmony with nature and yields enough reward to sustain their dignity as workers.

They are running this “experiment” across several villages in Sichuan. Yuan Yong, who spends most of his time in the villages providing technical training to farmers, has another pithy line: “You cannot tackle climate change in the very short-sighted ways that make it worse.”

Ultimately, Home Action’s working logic rests on two pillars. The first is promoting ecological agriculture techniques, the core of which is rebuilding healthy soil through no-till mulching — a growing body of research has confirmed that soil is a vital buffer for agriculture in the face of climate change. The second is emphasising farmers’ autonomy, reducing their dependence on external inputs and strengthening the cohesion of villagers’ self-organisations. The two reinforce each other: ecological techniques free farmers from the grip of chemical fertiliser, pesticide and seed dealers, while everyday practices — visiting one another’s fields, exchanging seeds — deepen the bonds among the elderly who have stayed behind. In a sense, this also serves as a kind of “social care service for the elderly.”

Last year in Zhazi Village, Jianyang, I sat in on a training session on no-till ridging for ecological rice, led by Yuan Yong. Rather than opening as the agronomist, he fell into chatting with them about health and the spring drought. Yuan Yong asked Grandpa Zhong to share his hands-on experience — he was the farmer who had begun growing rice using the no-till ridging technique the previous year.

At first, Grandpa Zhong was a little reluctant, but the moment the conversation turned to the state of pesticide use, he opened up: “You simply must never spray pesticides!” As the meeting broke up, Grandpa Zhong saw people off, laughing: “City folk fork out money every day to go to a gym to exercise — I don’t need any of it! I do a bit of work out in the fields each day, and every muscle gets a workout.”

Yuan Yong said that physical and mental well-being was the concern raised most often when villagers discussed their needs. During the project’s baseline survey, they had visited households to understand what people needed most. Expecting income to top the list, they were surprised to find that health came first.

“Next came caring for those left behind, followed by how to provide good education for the children, while improving access to daily necessities ranked only eighth.” From what they had observed in the villages they visited, the pressure on villagers’ livelihoods was not as heavy as they had anticipated.

This observation also ties into how Home Action selects its project sites.

Xiaoping explained that when screening potential locations, they prefer villages where most of the land remains in the hands of the villagers themselves. “In such villages, what people grow tends to be very diverse — it can largely meet ordinary folk’s needs for food across the seasons. And there is a fairly central reason for this: in these villages, people’s income does not depend entirely on what they earn from the land.”

These are also villages that tend to face severe ageing and hollowing out. Those who stay value their emotional ties to the community strongly, yet lack organised self-help structures in everyday life. Given this reality, Home Action does not rush to introduce ecological agriculture techniques when it arrives in a new village. Instead, it organises activities and conversations with villagers, jointly exploring points of entry for climate adaptation that suit the local context.

For example, in Weitai Village in Ya’an, their main work over the past two years has been organising community activities. Building on the established and well-organised seniors’ association already in place, sparked by the sudden shortage of the hybrid rice seed that villagers had been planting for years, they brought the association together to trace the timeline of how local rice landrace varieties had changed in recent years, the reasons behind those changes, and their impact on the community. They formed health and farming discussion groups, exploring with villagers the connections between landrace varieties, farming, health and the environment.

Through these activities and conversations, villagers began to develop a vivid, felt understanding of climate change — and a language for expressing it. At one community discussion, for instance, a villager noted that last year’s abnormally warm temperatures had ruined the flavour of their fermented tofu — it simply never tasted right.

At their project site in Songping Community, Panzhihua, frequent conversations with villagers led them to a local entry point for climate adaptation: the preservation of landrace varieties.

“When we first went into the village and asked whether households kept any local old varieties, everyone said they had none,” said Hu Xiaoping. But continued contact with villagers soon overturned that answer.

When they visited a villager’s home for a chat and were offered sunflower seeds, peanuts and home-cooked dishes, asking where the seed had come from, they immediately got a very different reply: “These are our own peanuts — smaller, but they taste so much better. This vegetable here is one of our local landraces; you plant it once and it keeps you fed for years.” Drawing on the landrace varieties collected during these surveys, Home Action then launched a Veg Plot Plan in the village, encouraging thirty households to convert their small private vegetable plots to ecological cultivation.

Beyond this, they supported a local ecological arts team in managing the village’s agricultural hazardous waste. The case made its way into Yuan Yong’s slide presentations at talks in other villages: “When ordinary people in our village take the initiative to look after environmental issues like this, other villagers who haven’t joined in will see it and think, ‘These are our own people, not outsiders’ — and they too will be very inclined to stop littering.”

III. Helping Those Who Stay Live Better

Measured by scale, most of the farms Home Action works with are not large. Apart from Zhazi Village, where they collaborate with the local village party committee and village committee on an ecological planting plan across just over a thousand mu of collectively owned land, the plots contributed by other willing villagers range from a fraction of a mu to a few mu.

“Whether it’s ‘conservation tillage’ or ‘climate-friendly rice cultivation,’ these are labels and techniques we bring in from outside. We don’t want villagers to come to us and simply pick up a ready-made set of techniques. We want them to learn to observe and analyse the problems right in front of them, to find wisdom in their own traditions, and to build their own understanding, their own methods and their own way of acting,” said Hu Xiaoping.

The transformation doesn’t happen overnight. It begins with a handful of people changing and then gradually ripples out to reach more. In both Zhazi Village and Ganjiadian Village, I met elderly farmers willing to give it a go. They were quiet folk, but once the talk turned to hands-on farming know-how, the words simply never ran out.

These are also the backbone villagers Hu Xiaoping speaks of. Cultivating such figures is a key aim of Home Action at the present stage. “Some of the issues we discuss do strike a chord with the needs of these backbone members. Take soil degradation, for instance — Grandpa Zhong in Zhazi Village had already sensed it himself, so when we bring up these topics, he doesn’t think we’re talking nonsense.”

In Ganjiadian Village, Yang Xiuyou is the backbone they work with.

This year, the number of villagers willing to try this approach has grown to four households. While Yuan Yong was testing the soil in Yang Xiuyou’s paddy, Sister Tang — who had also switched to ecological methods — hurried over to the field. Because of the soil’s inherent compaction, compounded by this spring’s extreme drought, she kept telling Yuan Yong that inserting seedlings under no-till was hard going, and brutal on the hands.

Hearing this, Yang Xiuyou murmured quietly from the side, “It is a bit tricky planting the seedlings this year, yes, but they don’t quite know how. We’ve got some grass cover on the surface — you just push the grass aside, press a little hole with your thumb, and stand the seedling up in the soil. That’s all it takes. It’s not quite the same as transplanting in a flooded paddy.” Back home, he went on to share the fertiliser and pest-control recipes he had picked up online over the past couple of years. His field fertiliser is a blend of brown sugar, white vinegar and beer. “You can also soak chillies in white vinegar for a fortnight and use that against rice stem borers — works brilliantly.”

This year, Yang Xiuyou has rolled the no-till mulching approach out across more of his own land. Besides the maize field where he continues to leave the grass cover in place, he is trying upland rice on a small plot, sowing Mojiang purple rice — a landrace variety supplied by Home Action. Come autumn, he plans to bring in the grain and then plant potatoes in the paddy straight away. He has taken Yuan Yong’s advice on the planting method: simply dig a grass nest through the straw mulch covering the ground, drop the seed in, and cover it back up. “It’s easy — when it’s time to harvest, you just pull the grass aside.”

Not long ago, Home Action organised a night walk and biodiversity survey in Zhazi Village, some fifty kilometres away. The ecological fields had welcomed quite a few more frogs, insects and birds. After the outing, birdwatching became the village ladies’ favourite pastime.

“Faced with the hollowing-out of the village, we haven’t tried to bring young people back through various schemes. Instead, we look at it from another angle — how the people who stay can live better,” said Hu Xiaoping.

Foodthink contributor

Zhu Ruomiao

Interested in both business and agriculture; a lover of the Mongolian Plateau and the morin khuur.

 

 

 

 

Unless otherwise noted, all images provided by Home Action.

Editor: Ling Yu