Farmers Come Home; the Big Farmers Panic

It is still cool in Tongchuan at the end of March. Two light, on-and-off showers fell here just a few days ago, but the dampness lingers.

After a long wait for the weather to clear, Hongxia was already up on the hill just past seven. She was in a bit of a hurry; the maize stalks from before the New Year still hadn’t been fully cleared. “There are still over 30 mu of hillside fields with maize stalks just sitting out there.” All of it needed to be gathered up as soon as possible. After all, in fewer than twenty days, around Grain Rain, a new crop of maize would need to go into the ground.

But beyond the pressure of time, Hongxia has a new worry. Even if she manages to get the fields ready, she doesn’t know whether she’ll be able to keep farming them in the future.

More and more people are returning to the village. A few of Hongxia’s relatives who came back home have asked for the land back that she had been helping them farm for several years — roughly 20 mu in all. “We’re all neighbours and fellow villagers. When they come asking for their land, you can’t exactly say no. Even if you sign something on paper, it’s three to five years at most.”

Hongxia worries that as more people come back, more will want their land back. Then all the investment her family has poured into this stretch of a hundred mu over the years might just be lost.

The Big Farmers Who Stayed in the Village

Hongxia is just over forty this year and has been farming with her husband, Daming, for more than twenty years. She always jokes with a smile, “I must count as an old farmer by now.” The couple couldn’t bear to see so much land going unfarmed — Daming especially, who has no taste for leaving to work for others; he simply loves the land.

So at first, the two of them simply looked after the roughly ten mu of land the village had allocated to their household. Because Daming preferred working the soil to dealing with people, they began taking on plots that relatives and neighbours had left fallow, and before long they had gathered up more than thirty mu.

After that, to make land preparation and other fieldwork easier, the couple bought more farm machinery: a rotary tiller, a seed drill, a small walk-behind reaper, a thresher, a three-wheeler, and so on. As the machinery grew, to spread the cost and keep the equipment in use, they also contracted additional plots in the village at about 200 yuan per mu a year. Altogether, that brought them to roughly 110 mu. Compared with the old days when every household in the village farmed its own little patch, this counted as a small-scale version of “large-scale farming.”

Daming is always going on about “the freedom of farming.” This “freedom” means not having a boss to answer to and being in charge of your own time. But the other side of “freedom” is working with almost no rest all year round. Land preparation and sowing in spring, pesticide spraying and weeding in summer, harvesting in autumn, and then winter — when the cold finally lets you take a brief breather.

This life isn’t much different from a regular job. A large stretch of land also means more reasons you can’t be away from home. As Hongxia puts it, “The land just walls you in.”

Rather than face the yellow earth with your back to the sky, more people choose to leave. In Tongchuan, farming can’t hold people.

Leaving the Land Fallow, Moving to the City

Tongchuan sits in central Shaanxi, bordered on all sides by the cities of Xianyang, Yan’an, and Weinan. It lies near the southern edge of the Northern Shaanxi Loess Plateau, and although administrative classification places it within the Guanzhong Plain, a satellite map tells a different story: the land here is far from flat — it is all hills and mountains. Among these, mountains, tablelands, ridges, mounds, gullies, and rivers all have their place.

It is precisely because of this terrain that farming here means making a living on hillside slopes — far harder and more exhausting than working flat ground. Hillside fields are no match for the open sweep of a great plain, where heavy mechanisation can save labour and lift productivity. For locals, the level of mechanisation here is very limited. “The smaller vehicles can still grunt up the slope and help haul a few things, but anything bigger — the real farm machinery — simply cannot get up.” In the end, a lot of the work still comes down to human hands.

And because the ground is uneven, the soil does not hold its fertility. “Once summer ends and autumn begins, when the rains come heavy, erosion is bad — the mud washes down the slope, leaving nothing but small stones behind.”

But for most people in the village, the reasons for leaving their land fallow go beyond the soil simply not being rich enough. Being able to harvest only one crop a year is a major problem in itself.

In most of Tongchuan, the temperature gap between winter and summer is large and grain yields are low — unlike in the Guanzhong area, where two crops can be harvested a year. In Tongchuan, many farmers who plant maize cannot also fit in wheat, and those who grow wheat cannot fit in maize. So, once the people here have worked out what the land can actually yield, most choose maize. “If the year doesn’t bring any major weather disruptions, maize can yield over 1,200 jin, but wheat? Only 400 to 500 jin.”

And for ordinary villagers here who need to put food on the table for their families, this is clearly not enough.

Farming means living at the mercy of the weather. To find other ways to earn, most people in the village left to work elsewhere. In Hongxia’s words: “No knowledge, no education — you can barely read a few characters. The only work left is low-skill, heavy manual labour.”

As more and more people leave the village, the land is gradually being left fallow. Compared with farming, working in a mine is a more direct route to cash. Land and mines, in a sense, form the most basic livelihood structure of this region — one offering “low returns but relative stability,” the other “high risk but quick money.”

Land That Wears People Down

Hongxia’s husband Daming had also worked in a coal mine, but only lasted a year before giving up. “A coal mine is dangerous after all — you can’t help feeling a little scared.”

Choosing to stay in the village and farm meant choosing to grind away on the land, day after day. Most of the Hongxia family’s plots are on the hillside — “110 mu, at least 100 mu of it on slopes.” Farming on slopes makes mechanisation difficult, and every task demands a great deal of manual labour.

Stones exposed by rain erosion have to be picked up one by one, by hand. Hongxia explains: “If you don’t clear the stones, the machinery breaks down easily and the maize doesn’t grow well either.” Whenever the sky clears after rain, she has to hurry up the hill — first raking the stones together with a nail rake, then putting on gloves and picking up the smaller ones, tossing them into baskets, and emptying basket after basket into the three-wheeler. Once a load is full, her husband rides it down to the bottom of the slope, and so it goes, load after load, until it is all hauled away.

From sowing to final harvest, a maize crop requires at least four rounds of handwork: sowing, weeding the young seedlings, applying chemical fertiliser, hand-picking maize, shelling, threshing, and cutting the stalks. “Every single stage demands human hands.”

Hongxia’s family farms a large amount of land, and with no machinery that can work on the slopes, they have no choice but to hand-pick the maize entirely by hand. When the maize is ripe, the two of them simply can’t manage it alone. The harvest takes at most half a month, start to finish, and the worst fear is rain — if it comes, they must race to harvest and inevitably hire help. Labour costs are a significant outlay. By the time of the maize harvest, they hire workers at 100 yuan per person per day, about four at a time, for just over half a month. This also means that even expanding the scale cannot significantly reduce the unit cost of labour, which is inherently difficult to quantify.

And over the past few years, Hongxia has clearly noticed some changes in the village’s labour market.

When the City Is No Longer a Way Forward

“A lot of people have come back.”

When it comes to more people in the village, the first thing Hongxia noticed was the drop in day rates for hand-picking maize. “In previous years, a worker would earn at least 130 yuan a day. Last year it fell to 100.”

Hongxia feels this shift began after the pandemic. Whether heading to the city for work or looking for a livelihood in the mines, there are fewer opportunities than before.

In earlier years, Tongchuan had been “rich” too. During the First Five-Year Plan, the state anchored two key projects here — the Wangshi’ao Coal Mine and the Yaoxian Cement Plant — laying the foundation for Tongchuan’s industrial base. At that time, Shaanxi’s industrial development relied heavily on Tongchuan. Given the city’s strategic importance, in 1958 Tongchuan became the second prefecture-level city established in Shaanxi, after the provincial capital Xi’an.

In those days, Tongchuan’s industry grew rapidly. Coal output once accounted for 70 per cent of the entire province, making it a major national coal production base and the largest cement production base in the north-west. This brought plenty of opportunities to people nearby. Even villagers looking for work outside the village didn’t need to travel far — with so many mining areas in the Tongchuan region, “if you couldn’t farm, a lot of people just went to the coal mines.”

For many, mining remains a practical choice. “If you can put in the hard labour, a monthly income of seven or eight thousand yuan is possible.”

Beyond the coal mines, being a migrant worker, working in a restaurant kitchen, or doing security or domestic work — these have become the main jobs for villagers who leave for the city. “Digging food out of the soil is never certain. One severe drought or heavy rain and the year’s harvest is ruined. Working elsewhere is hard too, but at least you get a steady monthly income. With a thousand or so in your pocket, your mind is at ease.”

Years of unrestrained mining have left the city “riddled with holes.” It has created vast goafs and subsidence areas, and caused serious environmental pollution — so much so that Tongchuan has been called “a city you can’t see from a satellite.”

Over time, reliance on a single industrial sector has left Tongchuan’s economy near the bottom of Shaanxi. The gradual wind-down of heavy industry has cost many people their chances of finding work in the city. According to Hongxia, the mines have raised their standards — they now only take young workers, and once you are over 40, you are essentially out. On top of that, many mines have reached the end of their operational life and closed down, which means fewer opportunities.

Jobs in the city are hard to find and the cost of living is high, so some who can’t make it work have no choice but to go home. In the city, the moment you open your eyes you are spending money — rent, groceries, everything adds up. But back in the village, the house is yours, no rent to pay, and if there is a patch of ground at the door, growing a few vegetables is enough to get through the summer. “We are all from the countryside. If you can’t earn money, you have to find ways to cut costs.”

Another shift is even more subtle. In the past, it was rural people moving to the city. Now, some urban residents are even heading back to the countryside to pick up odd jobs. Hongxia mentions that some people who used to work in the mining areas — their land has been requisitioned and they still have no stable income — “living in the city is expensive, so they come out to the village to work.” During busy farming seasons, they help with flower thinning, hand-picking maize, and picking apples.

This reverse migration has pushed down labour prices. But that does not mean rural labour is plentiful. Quite the opposite — local labour is still in short supply. The younger generation is unwilling to do farm work, leaving the middle-aged and elderly behind. “On top of that, they still have to worry about their newborn grandkids, so they can’t keep at the work for long.” And those who are too old simply can’t manage the fieldwork anymore. The local labour pool has also become more complex, drawing on elderly villagers, unemployed urban residents, and “landless farmers” who were relocated into the cities. Together, they form a loose and unstable labour market.

Those Who Came Back Want the Land

Following a slightly winding road up the hillside, the view is nothing but the locally typical mottled yellow-brown earth and a grey-brown sky like a haze. Hongxia has no mind to look around; all she sees are the withered, yellow maize stalks that still need clearing.

Winter has passed, spring is here, and the farmers are about to begin a new round of sowing. Hongxia can only hold on to the one certainty before her: “Whether it can be planted or not, first clear all the stones. The land must not go fallow — as long as it isn’t lying idle, that’s good enough.”

The villagers who have come back naturally want their land returned. When villagers lease land to one another, it is not like an outside company or institution taking a formal contract with standardised terms. Rural life runs on personal ties. Most arrangements are verbal — you go to someone’s home, share a meal, and the leasing is settled. Even if the neighbours are not on speaking terms, finding an intermediary to pass a word along is enough to establish the connection. But this leaves a vulnerability.

For farmers who expanded their operations by leasing land, once the land is taken back, the risk surfaces immediately — the earlier machinery investment has become a sunk cost. And there is no way to cut their losses. “You can’t sell the machines, and even with less land, you still can’t do without them,” Hongxia says.

Hongxia and her husband originally spent around 150,000 yuan on farm machinery — all the vehicles, big and small, added up to that total. In fact, even in their best year, not counting the machinery outlay, their net profit was barely a thousand yuan. Then came the persistent rain of 2025. The maize was all waterlogged; what they managed to gather in would not dry, and it all went mouldy. One mu could only fetch 300 yuan, which just about covered the cost of seed and chemical fertiliser.

It is not just Hongxia. There is another young man in the village, in his thirties, facing the same dilemma. “He’s a university graduate,” Hongxia says, her voice laced with regret. Before the pandemic, he had specifically gone back to the village to farm at scale and mechanise the land. He figured that one person plus machines could handle over a hundred mu and bring in a hundred thousand or so a year. So the young man was ready to go all in — he even paid 200 yuan above the local market rate, contracting about 80 mu in the village at 400 to 500 yuan per mu. But before three years were up, he was left with less than 50 mu to plant. “Everyone else has taken their land back.”

Besides the land, the young graduate had poured quite a lot of money into machinery over the course of setting up. “With less land to work now, it all just sits in the yard collecting dust.” He had thought about helping others with their autumn harvest to earn enough for fuel, but he cannot simply sit at home waiting day after day. When he adds it all up, these scattered bits of income are nowhere near enough to keep a family going.

In the end, his “grand” ambitions were let down by the land. “This year he’s gone to the coal mine too.” On this land, those who have been to school and those who have not arrive at the same end.

An Uncertain Future

For scattered small-scale farmers, farming brings even less income. When the land comes back into their hands, it does not bring a stable life. If anything, it feels like a desperate fallback.

Hongxia mentions that her village still counts as one with relatively generous land allocations — each person can be allocated a bit over two mu, close to three, and a whole household’s share added together is only ten or so mu. Over a year, one mu yields roughly 1,200 jin of maize, and in recent years the buying price has mostly fluctuated between 1.1 and 1.4 yuan per jin. That means a household’s annual income is just over ten thousand yuan. Meanwhile, the yearly cost per mu — seed, rotary tillage, sowing, fertiliser — adds up to about 300 yuan. After deducting costs and dividing what remains among a family of four or five, there is barely anything at all. “I thought I could pick up odd jobs to make up the difference, but now there are no jobs to pick up either.”

And all of this truly reflects the current state of the countryside. For most people, there is no stable upward path to a better living — only livelihood combinations that are constantly being shuffled in response to whatever comes. The rural population comes and goes, in constant flux, yet never with a clear direction.

It is like the land here. In previous years, no one in the village was farming, and the plots gradually consolidated into the hands of those willing to work them, like Hongxia. Now, in this uncertain life, people have come back, and the land is fragmenting again, plot by plot, back into scattered holdings.

Hongxia is no different. Today, she and her husband are still the so-called hundred-mu farming operators. Their future, too, is uncertain. “If we have any less land, we’ll try livestock, or set up a snack stall.” Asked about the future, Hongxia’s answer is characteristically practical, yet her tone is full of uncertainty and bewilderment.

Although it looks as though there are many options, the reality is that they are merely plans without a clear path. For someone who has spent half a life working the land, there is still no way to make peace with the slow fact of losing it.

Daming in the text is a pseudonym. All images are provided by the author.

Editor: Xiaodan