Show FARMING im N IN china CH I 1 NA A 7 7 77 7 XI AN x aa ta t F 7 i chinese foot power irrigation wheel Prova prepared red by national geographic society D 0 service ULNA has its ita lean years and tat fat C CHINA its serious famines in some sections but on the whole it performs pretty well its stupendous job of feeding a quarter of the human race and it has carried on successfully for thousands of years although it has haa had none of the advantages of scientific bureaus for the study of soils bolls crops and weather conditions this enviable position china owes to the oe note of permanent agriculture struck by its husbandmen when our ancestors were skin clad nomads in no other country on earth Is it so true that all trade as all life rests upon the farmers primitive activity in china this is 19 all 11 the more significant ant for its soil has been cultivated since the days of noah and has supported the densest population in the world through millenniums of history longer and more checkered than our own it Is difficult to determine at exactly what period the chinese settled in the middle kingdom but the latest arche discoveries seem to prove t that haf their first home on the great plain of northern china near the yellow river was made s so 0 early that they may perhaps be counted as the aborigines of the northwest china provinces the chinese themselves attribute to the emperor shen nung who Is supposed to have lived about 2700 B 0 the arts of husbandry and the enven tion of the plow this mythical personage still remains the patron of farmers and was until the abolition of the monarchy in 1911 1011 worshiped yearly at the season of the spring sowing by the emperor in and by his delegates in every province to this sovereign are also credited the 0 original arrangements with regard to landed property in china As a matter of fact it seems probable that thee the early ariy settlers separated into clans or family groups that these clans came naturally to vest authority in elders and that the latter in the course of ages became the rulers and finally the owners of the land vast areas not cultivated despite the density of the rural population in china where in some provinces there are sections having people donkeys and pigs to the square mile or people 21 24 donkeys and 24 pigs to one of our 40 acre farms there remain vast areas of uncultivated because able mountain land in china proper the chinese are able to live on their small m all holdings only by reason of favorable ab le climatic conditions the fertility of t the he soil effective agricultural methods extreme personal economy and the small taxes taken by the state that wise old emperor klang kang hsi in honor of the fifty jubilee of his reign in 1711 A D issued a decree saying that as the population of the empire increased the amount of arable land did not increase and that the land tax should therefore be estimated on the census of that year and should never be increased it never I 1 was in 1753 the total revenue from the land tax stood at or about in gold and in low 1000 i were collected from the same source the decrease being accounted for by the calamities of the preceding years if the weekend week end t traveler tia veler in china gets the idea from looking out of train windows that he is in a land of continuous farms and vegetable gardens his impressions are largely flue due to the fact that wherever cultivation Is possible it Is highly intensive and that not an inch which might be used Is wasted ona family to the farm the working of a chinese farm depends entirely upon personal human labor and generally upon that of one family tradition custom and economic conditions do not encourage the investment m ent of capital for large scale farming I 1 the fields of china as already pointed out have been cultivated sams fb for several thousand years by the same method without overtaxing overtaking over taxing their resources this remarkable fact Is due to certain peculiarities of the soil itself plus very careful working guided by the experience of centuries when we reflect upon the depleted fertility of our own older farm lands as prof F H king remarks comparatively ively few of which have seen a cent service and upon the enormous quantity of mineral fertilizers which are being annually applied to them in order to secure paying yields we cannot but admire liow how the chinese have managed mana ged to maintain so well the first condition of farming soll soil fertility and to solve the p problem eblem of soil thrust Th aust on one of the moat fu funda ada mental difficult and vital problems of all civilized people perhaps the greatest agricultural triumph of the chinese farmer la Is tits hla knowledge and use of natural fertilizers tili ile he cannot afford nor in many places could he obtain them even were he able to pay the price expensive phosphates and nitrates commercially prepared the chief aids he can enlist in hta his everlasting battlo battle against soil exhaustion are human and animal manure in the west and more especially in the united states man to quote professor king again Is the most extravagant accelerator of waste the world has ever endured ills his withering blight has fallen upon every living thing within his reach himself not excepted and his besom of destruction in the uncontrolled hands of a generation has swept into the sea soil fertility which only centuries of life could accumulate fertilizer carefully saved on the basis of the data of wolff kellner and of carpenter or of hall the people of bf the united states and of U europe drope are yearly pouring into the sea lakes and rivers and into the underground waters from to pounds of nitrogen to pounds of potassium and to pounds of phosphorus per million of adult population and this waste we esteem one ot of the great achievements of our civilization whereas in china all thi ahli Is saved and returned to the field fl near every farmhouse and often in a proximity to the living rooms that shock our olfactory nerves stand potter patter jars tor for storing this precious fertilizer till ti zer later to lie be diluted with water before it Is fed to the crops household waste stubble roughage rou glage bage from the fields ashes and the drop pings from passing caravans carefully collected by small boys with baskets and scoops are all made into compost by being mixed with earth agriculture in china falls naturally natu rully into two great divisions the wet farming of the canal or rice growing country and the dry farming of the northern plains or grain growling growing section the outstanding feature of chinese agriculture Is the amount of human labor expended upon it IL fields are prepared by hand often watered by hand seeds are sown and crops fertilized and reaped by hand from dawn to dusk the farmers family and a animals work on the land often cooking the midday meal a mess of millet on an improvised mud stove and using as a manger for their beasts the cart that has hai carried out compost and will bring home the ripe crop though groups of villagers sometimes work together hired help Is rare consequently the chinese farmer and his family work their own lands unaided this means of course phenomenal energy on the part of all ail how rice rica Is grown nowhere Is the industry of the chinese farmer better illustrated than in the southern or rice growing provinces where climatic clInia tic conditions permit of several sometimes as many as four crops a year from the same soil since rice la Is not only the staple but the favorite food of the people from the highest to the lowest it la is not lot surprising that paddy fields form an eighth of the total area of cultivated 1 land in china yet notwithstanding the enormous acreage of rice planted each year since B 0 this crop Is all set out in clumps and every spear transplanted by hand the double operation allows the farmers to economize their land and save sare in many ways way except in labor the one thing they have in superabundance each rice field la Is surrounded by its own little dam a foot high some of these fields are no larger than a small room and one observer says he saw some in the interior of china no ino larger than a dining table even one bearing its crop surrounded by its rim and holding water yet scarcely larger than a good sized napkin in a corner of his field the thrifty husbandman prepares his nursery for raising seedlings sufficient to plant his whole land the soil Is churned up by the plow until li it becomes a mix ture of wet mud and manure about the consistency of porridge seeds which are then thickly sown sawa sprout in a very few days turning the nursery into a carpet of young green plants the rest reit of the land has meanwhile been prepared for their reception embankments bank ments made watertight water tight etc enough water Is admitted by ar artificial tin means if the rainfall cannot bo be depended upon to a depth of several inches a rake harrow used to remove grass a and nd weeds apro uprooted doted by the plow and the soil again worked over to a well smoothed surfaced surface |