A Post-2000 Woman Learns to Farm: “We Can Drive This Big Machine, Too”
Foodthink Says
Yet even now, in the world of agriculture, gender disparities persist. Women’s roles in the agricultural food system often go insufficiently recognised, which is why the United Nations has designated 2026 as the International Year of the Woman Farmer, to raise public awareness, help narrow the gender gap, and improve the livelihoods of women around the world.
Tomorrow is International Women’s Day, so we recommend this article by Wu Ting, a woman born in the 2000s, from Anhui. Growing up, she watched her elders toil over the land. Amid the broader trend of agricultural mechanisation, Wu Ting’s father also bought a combine harvester and became a farm machinery operator, supporting the family by providing agricultural machinery services. Out of interest, after recently returning home, Wu Ting attended a farm machinery training course.
Through this training, she not only observed the pressing need among older-generation farm machinery operators to update their skills and keep pace with the times, but also keenly perceived the constraints women face in the world of agriculture. Below are Wu Ting’s observations and reflections on gender bias in agricultural life.
I. Sitting for the Farm Machinery Operator Exam
More skills, more options, I figured, so I called the registration number straight away. I didn’t really have any grand career plan in mind — I just wanted to get a certificate.
Most farm machinery operators today are freelancers — mostly people who don’t want to work for someone else but still need to earn a living. When the harvest rush in northern Anhui wraps up, many of them team up in groups of three or five and head elsewhere, as close as Shanghai, as far as Jiangxi or even Guangxi.
Being a farm machinery operator is how my family’s elder generation has supported the household. In 2009, my father joined the combine harvester operator trade. As a child, watching my parents leave home, I often felt reluctant to let them go.
Their work also showed me how hard life can be. One year, my parents went out for the harvest rush, and summer temperatures regularly soared above 40 degrees. Over that month, they kept suffering heatstroke. By the time they got home, both of them looked visibly different from before — more worn out. I only learned about the hardships of it later on.
Accidents can happen, too. A farm machinery operator they knew, during a rice harvest, had his machine tip over into a ditch, and the combine harvester crushed him. After his death, the weight of the family fell to his wife and children, and the child was forced to drop out of school.
Compared with farm machinery operators, my previous career was admittedly “comfortable” — no wind or sun, no heavy physical labour in the fields, not so grueling. But the “decent” money it earned was only enough to feed myself, and spending all day in a cramped office space was mentally draining, too.
Farm machinery operators, on the other hand, work for themselves. They earn more, and their work carries a greater sense of fulfilment: standing on the machine, facing the golden crops, their hearts full of the joy of a bountiful harvest. But it is also a harder line of work, and one that carries real risk.
Two generations, two different forms of labour, two different kinds of hardship — neither one easy.
II. The Female Trainees’ Fear
I preferred the practical sessions to the theory ones. The practical work started with the whole group learning to drive tractors. Before, I had always just watched this big beast from a distance — I never once imagined I would one day be the one driving it.
I also noticed that women were few and far between in the training cohort. Our batch had 50 trainees in total, only 7 of them women; the rest were mostly male veteran farm machinery operators who had driven tractors before. Most of them were in their forties or fifties, people from the three districts and five counties of Fuyang who worked in agriculture and doubled as farm machinery operators. The tractor was their “old pal” of many years, but they had virtually no experience operating drones. They had come to learn one more skill on top of their old pal — drone operation — so they could spray their own fields more conveniently and also earn a little extra by spraying for others.
The training course was run by the Fuyang Branch of the Central Agricultural Broadcasting School, Anhui Province, which everyone simply calls the “Agricultural Broadcasting School“.
In a government-funded free farm machinery training course like this, these trainees — who had already built up a good deal of farming experience — could at least get a grip on the ins and outs of these newer pieces of agricultural equipment, so they would not get the short end of the stick when consulting at the shop just because they did not know the trade.
Compared with the experienced male trainees, the women were far more timid when faced with the tractors. Just as the stigma of “women drivers” still lingers to this day, a similar prejudice is at work in the world of farm machinery — many people unconsciously file it under “a man’s world.”
In the practical session, before any of us women had even put a hand on the controls, we had already started to hesitate. We looked at the old family grave not far away in the field, then at the four tractors lined up in a row in front of us, and every single one of us wore a look of apprehension — afraid we would fumble it, hit something by accident, and damage someone else’s family grave. The safety officer quickly reassured us: “Just put it in first gear, take it slow, and there is a safety officer on the machine with you.”
The self-doubt still spread. “The men drive them better — they have experience. We are still a bit short of that,” said one of the older female trainees.
I was a little indignant, so I raised my hand to signal that I would be up next. Then I stepped over the dirt ditch in front of the field and strided purposefully toward the tractor.
But stubbornness aside, at first I did not even know how to open the tractor’s cab door. Once I was inside, the safety officer sat to my left and walked me through each step one by one: first, turn the key to the ignition; to the left of the steering wheel is the forward-and-reverse lever — push it up for forward, press it down for reverse; to engage a gear, you first push the gear lever forward and to the left, then shift it right into first gear. Then he pointed out the positions of the brake, the throttle, and the clutch.
I was so nervous my head went completely blank — I would hear a few instructions and they would slip right out again. My palms started to sweat. By the time I had finally coaxed the tractor into a slow start, the tractor driven by a trainee beside me suddenly barrelled straight toward me. Instinctively I slammed the brake. Only after that scare did I finally get the positions of the brake, throttle, and clutch properly sorted in my head.
We reached the end of the field — time to turn around. I sat in the driver’s seat, open land stretching out before me, the wheat in the neighbouring field just poking its head through the soil, the roar of the engine filling my ears. Only then did I realise my palms were completely drenched in sweat. Fortunately I was wearing gloves, so the steering wheel at least did not slip.
I forced myself not to get distracted. Both hands gripped the steering wheel tight, my eyes fixed firmly ahead, and in my head I ran through the steps the safety officer had just explained, over and over. When I finally made the turn, I let out a great involuntary breath, and the sweat on my palms gradually receded.
III. We Can Drive This Big Beast, Too
Driving a combine harvester is a completely different matter from driving a car. The harvester at the training base has no steering wheel — just a single seat in the cab. In front of you are two control levers, left and right; at your feet is a very wide brake pedal, and no clutch. You insert the key, press the red button, and the engine fires up. Where the machine goes depends entirely on the two levers in your hands: push them forward and it goes forward; leave them alone and it stays put.
At first, quite a few of the male trainees struggled with it, which only made me more uncertain. I found myself weighing whether to try at all. I even thought about talking others out of it: “It’s too hard, forget it — don’t tip the machine over. It’s this big; if it does flip, we can’t afford the compensation.”
The female trainees training alongside me chimed in: “Even those veteran farm machinery operators can’t drive it well. There are so many men here, and not many dare to get in.” Another woman picked up the thread: “This thing is really meant for men to drive. They can’t handle it, and we certainly can’t — women just can’t drive a combine harvester.”
In truth, the younger female trainees were all a bit indignant, but none of us was willing to push back directly on the spot. Then, a male trainee nearly drove the harvester onto the kerb, and the cutting header came close to knocking a tree over.
That only deepened our hesitation. The woman beside me murmured under her breath: “This harvester isn’t particularly big, and logically it shouldn’t be that hard. But I just don’t dare — I have no confidence at all… and yet I still want to give it a go.”
She was a few years older than me, not yet thirty. Before coming, her family had actually been supportive of her enrolling. “My father-in-law said if I learned it, then when the family buys a combine harvester, he’d let me drive it and harvest the rice for the household.”
Later, a teacher from the Agricultural Broadcasting School asked, “Any female trainee who’d like to come up and give it a try?” Everyone shuffled past each other, nobody willing to speak first. She hesitated for a moment, then suddenly stepped forward, getting ahead of another male trainee and sliding into the combine harvester’s cab.
The safety officer first showed her how to start the engine and work the levers. Soon, the harvester crept forward under her control, the body of the machine remarkably steady.
I heard an older woman exclaim, “So the harvester doesn’t rock after all? I just watched those men driving and it swayed so badly — I assumed that was just how it went.”
Throughout this I had been filming her on my phone. Watching her drive so steadily — reverse parking without crossing a line, keeping a generous distance from both the kerb and the trees along the edge — I suddenly felt a flicker of confidence: maybe I could drive it well, too.
So the “only men can drive it” that lives in our heads is not down to any innate difference. Women are more prone, in this unspoken default, to deny themselves and deny other women: the more afraid we are to try, the more it looks like “see, they really can’t,” and the stereotype just keeps cycling on.
When it was my turn, there was still a little scare. Once I was in the cab and the door clicked shut, my mind went completely blank, and I had no choice but to call the safety officer back over. The old machine was uncooperative — the moment I put pressure on a lever, it jerked in spasms. I was breaking out in a sweat on my back, and my reverse parking still clipped the line. But the machine did end up back where it started, no tree hit, no kerb struck.
With the first one done, the second, third, and fourth followed quickly. Almost every female trainee had a turn, and that older woman did as well. She drove a bit shakily, but she got through it. When she climbed down, there was disbelief in her eyes, and she said, delighted, “My legs were shaking sitting up there — I never thought we could drive a machine this big!”
IV. The Assessment
Engage the gear, release the clutch — the tractor pulled away smoothly. Following what the instructor had taught me, I held the steering wheel steady and kept my eyes on the earthen ridge in the distance as a reference point — a new technique picked up from the course. As I drove, I suddenly remembered something my dad used to say when I was little: “You can tell by the sound of the engine whether the ploughing is even. If it sounds muffled, it is going too deep; if it sounds thin, it is too shallow.”
I instinctively slowed down and tilted my head to listen. Sure enough, the stretch of field I had just ploughed had sounded a bit muffled. I eased the control lever up slightly, listened again, and the sound steadied. In the rearview mirror, the turned-over soil was a pale yellow, spread out evenly behind me. The damp, earthy smell drifted into the cab — the familiar scent of the land.
When the assessment was over, I tossed the pair of gloves, soaked through with sweat, into the bin at the training station. It had done its job, like the stone roller in my memories. In the old days, we used the stone roller to flatten the earth and prepare it as a rice-drying yard. Then came the grain suction machine, the grain turner, and the dryer. The drying yard was gradually replaced by concrete ground, and the stone roller was moved under the eaves. Later still, the eaves were torn down; the new house had no eaves, and the stone roller lost its place in the world.
On the bus back, looking out the window, I saw a drone casting a white mist of pesticide over the wheat field in the setting sun, even and fine. And by the field ridge, an old man stood with his hands behind his back, watching, his shadow stretching long. The pesticide mist from the drone was falling gently on a patch of young, tender wheat shoots just beyond the shadow.
Before we parted, I said to the older woman who had trained with me: “Get your father-in-law to pick out a combine harvester. From now on, you drive it — no more hiring someone else to harvest your rice.”
Editor: Xiao Dan