Farmers of Forty Centuries; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea, and Japan

by F. H. King

Four months before the camera fixed the activity shown, men had brought waste from the stables of Shanghai fifteen miles by water, depositing it upon the canal bank between layers of thin mud dipped from the canal, and left it to ferment. The eight men were removing this compost to the pit seen in Fig. 99, then nearly filled. Near by in the same field was a second pit seen in Fig. 100, excavated three feet deep and rimmed about with the earth removed, making it two feet deeper.

After these pits had been filled the clover which was in blossom beyond the pits would be cut and stacked upon them to a height of five to eight feet and this also saturated, layer by layer, with mud brought from the canal, and allowed to ferment twenty to thirty days until the juices set free had been absorbed by the winter compost beneath, helping to carry the ripening of that still further, and until the time had arrived for fitting the ground for the next crop. This organic matter, fermented with the canal mud, would then be distributed by the men over the field, carried a third time on their shoulders, notwithstanding its weight was many tons.

This manure had been collected, loaded and carried fifteen miles by water; it had been unloaded upon the bank and saturated with canal mud; the field had been fitted for clover the previous fall and seeded; the pits had been dug in the fields; the winter compost had been carried and placed in the pits; the clover was to be cut, carried by the men on their shoulders, stacked layer by layer and saturated with mud dipped from the canal; the whole would later be distributed over the field and finally the earth removed from the pits would be returned to them, that the service of no ground upon which a crop might grow should be lost.

Such are the tasks to which Chinese farmers hold themselves, because they are convinced desired results will follow, because their holdings are so small and their families so large. These practices are so extensive in China and so fundamental in the part they play in the maintenance of high productive power in their soils that we made special effort to follow them through different phases. In Fig. 101 we saw the preparation being made to build one of the clover compost stacks saturated with canal mud. On the left the thin mud had been dipped from the canal; way-farers in the center were crossing the foot-bridge of the country by-way; and beyond rises the conical thatch to shelter the water buffalo when pumping for irrigating the rice crop to be fed with this plant food in preparation. On the right were two large piles of green clover freshly cut and a woman of the family at one of them was spreading it to receive the mud, while the men-folk were coming from the field with more clover on their carrying poles. We came upon this scene just before the dinner hour and after the workers had left another photograph was taken at closer range and from a different side, giving the view seen in Fig. 102. The mud had been removed some days and become too stiff to spread, so water was being brought from the canal in the pails at the right for reducing its consistency to that of a thin porridge, permitting it to more completely smear and saturate the clover. The stack grew, layer by layer, each saturated with the mud, tramped solid with the bare feet, trousers rolled high. Provision had been made here for building four other stacks.

Further along we came upon the scene in Fig. 103 where the building of the stack of compost and the gathering of the mud from the canal were simultaneous. On one side of the canal the son, using a clam-shell form of dipper made of basket-work, which could be opened and shut with a pair of bamboo handles, had nearly filled the middle section of his boat with the thin ooze, while on the other side, against the stack which was building, the mother was emptying a similar boat, using a large dipper, also provided with a bamboo handle. The man on the stack is a good scale for judging its size.

We came next upon a finished stack on the bank of another canal, shown in Fig. 104, where our umbrella was set to serve as a scale. This stack measured ten by ten feet on the ground, was six feet high and must have contained more than twenty tons of the green compost. At the same place, two other stacks had been started, each about fourteen by fourteen feet, and foundations were laid for six others, nine in all.

During twenty or more days this green nitrogenous organic matter is permitted to lie fermenting in contact with the fine soil particles of the ooze with which it had been charged. This is a remarkable practice in that it is a very old, intensive application of an important fundamental principle only recently understood and added to the science of agriculture, namely, the power of organic matter, decaying rapidly in contact with soil, to liberate from it soluble plant food; and so it would be a great mistake to say that these laborious practices are the result of ignorance, of a lack of capacity for accurate thinking or of power to grasp and utilize. If the agricultural lands of the United States are ever called upon to feed even 1200 millions of people, a number proportionately less than one-half that being fed in Japan today, very different practices from those we are now following will have been adopted. We can believe they will require less human bodily effort and be more efficient. But the knowledge which can make them so is not yet in the possession of our farmers, much less the conviction that plant feeding and more persistent and better directed soil management are necessary to such yields as will then be required.

Later, just before the time for transplanting rice, we returned to the same district to observe the manner of applying this compost to the field, and Fig. 105 is prepared from photographs taken then, illustrating the activities of one family, as seen during the morning of May 28th. Their home was in a near-by village and their holding was divided into four nearly rectangular paddies, graded to water level, separated by raised rims, and having an area of nearly two acres. Three of these little fields are partly shown in the illustration, and the fourth in Fig. 160. In the background of the upper section of Fig. 105, and under the thatched shelter, was a native Chinese cow, blindfolded and hitched to the power-wheel of a large wooden-chain pump, lifting water from the canal and flooding the field in the foreground, to soften the soil for plowing. Riding on the power-wheel was a girl of some twelve years, another of seven and a baby. They were there for entertainment and to see that the cow kept at work. The ground had been sufficiently softened so that the father had begun plowing, the cow sinking to her knees as she walked. In the same paddy, but shown in the section below, a boy was spreading the clover compost with his hands, taking care that it was finely divided and evenly scattered. He had been once around before the plowing began. This compost had been brought from a stack by the side of a canal, and two other men were busy still bringing the material to one of the other paddies, one of whom, with his baskets on the carrying pole appears in the third section. Between these two paddies was the one seen at the bottom of the illustration, which had matured a crop of rape that had been pulled and was lying in swaths ready to be moved. Two other men were busy here, gathering the rape into large bundles and carrying it to the village home, where the women were threshing out the seed, taking care not to break the stems which, after threshing, were tied into bundles for fuel. The seed would be ground and from it an oil expressed, while the cake would be used as a fertilizer.

This crop of rape is remarkable for the way it fits into the economies of these people. It is a near relative of mustard and cabbage; it grows rapidly during the cooler portions of the season, the spring crop ripening before the planting of rice and cotton; its young shoots and leaves are succulent, nutritious, readily digested and extensively used as human food, boiled and eaten fresh, or salted for winter use, to be served with rice; the mature stems, being woody, make good fuel; and it bears a heavy crop of seed, rich in oil, which has been extensively used for lights and in cooking, while the rape seed cake is highly prized as a manure and very extensively so used.

In the early spring the country is luxuriantly green with the large acreage of rape, later changing to a sea of most brilliant yellow and finally to an ashy grey when the leaves fall and the stems and pods ripen. Like the dairy cow, rape produces a fat, in the ratio of about forty pounds of oil to a hundred pounds of seed, which may be eaten, burned or sold without materially robbing the soil of its fertility if the cake and the ashes from the stems are returned to the fields, the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen of which the oil is almost wholly composed coming from the atmosphere rather than from the soil.