Chasing Trends on Five Mu of Land: A Shaanxi Farmer’s 30 Years

One of Liquan’s most well-known trademarks is its apples. The area was even once celebrated with the saying, “For Chinese apples, look to Shaanxi; for Shaanxi apples, look to Liquan.” In the past, virtually every household there grew apples, often supplemented by peaches, pears and other fruit, but apples were the undisputed star. Our family started growing apples in the 1990s, and they became a real source of income for us.

More than thirty years have passed. The original fruit trees have grown old, apples no longer bring in what they once did, and my father has been repeatedly torn between growing grain and growing fruit. On our family’s five mu of land, the planting has shifted from grain to fruit, then back to grain, and now back to fruit again. The changes in what the land grows are the changes in a farmer’s life, in their fate, and in the times themselves.

Apples Brought Wealth to Liquan

The first variety we grew was Qinguan. Developed through cross-breeding at Northwest A&F University in the 1950s, it was once widely planted around Liquan for its cold and drought resistance and its ease of management.

During the height of Liquan’s apple boom – the early 1990s – my father planted apples on the four mu of private plot closest to our home. Those were the first apple trees in our village, and the fruit they bore would become the earliest harvest the village ever produced. In 1993, the first year our trees came into full bearing, everyone from the neighbourhood came out to help with the picking. The orchard was abuzz, as if the family were hosting a wedding or a funeral.

That year, our family harvested over four thousand jin of apples in all, at just over eight mao a jin, bringing in more than 3,200 yuan. It was the first time we had ever taken in that kind of money. When the buyer pressed a thick stack of cash into my parents’ hands, I could clearly see their hands not knowing where to rest – I knew that was the look of being overwhelmed with joy.

At the time, our family had less than 1,000 yuan in savings. When the money from our first apple harvest finally arrived, my parents were overjoyed – and anxious. With so much cash, no matter where they put it, they felt uneasy. They kept moving it from one hiding spot to another, never quite at peace. Fortunately, the cashier at the village committee could hold deposits for villagers, and in the end my father took the money over, which at last put that worry to rest.

It is fair to say that for a good while, many people in Liquan turned their finances around thanks to Qinguan. Then Fuji apples came along, and Qinguan could not match them in either flavour or appearance, so virtually everyone switched to Fuji. Today, the Qinguan cultivar has become something of a dinosaur fossil.

Digging Up Trees to Grow Grain

On our family’s land, there are now over 80 Fuji apple trees; the rest is mainly planted with grain.

These apple trees were planted seven or eight years ago. Having got through the first four years of growth, they have settled into steady production, and they are my parents’ treasured trees. Fruit trees cannot do without tending. During the years my parents were in Xi’an helping me look after the children, every weekend they would make the most of those two full days to catch a bus back to Liquan and work in the apple orchard. Squeezing in every possible task, they never missed a single thing that needed doing among the trees.

When I went home for the May holiday this year, I just caught my parents in the middle of bagging the apples. As noon approached and the sun was at its fiercest, the orchard was oppressively hot and muggy, yet they worked with real focus. Each of them held a lit incense stick, a bundle of thin plastic bags hanging from their chest, and they moved through the orchard, searching among the branches for marble-sized apples. The moment they found one, they nimbly slipped a bag over it, then sealed the neck with the incense.

“This year hasn’t been bad – five thousand bags to go, that counts as a good year.” Fruit bagging is one of the most important tasks in apple cultivation. These past few years, the family’s very limited income has come largely from these apples. With the yield at stake, they dare not be careless. Every year at this point, it takes them about ten days, working tree by tree, to bag every apple. At the end of a day, each of them will have bagged two or three hundred. In the past, the bagging season at home lasted just over a month, because at the time we had two or three hundred trees.

At the turn from spring to summer in 2019, we were hit by a severe hailstorm here. The apples were in their fruit-set stage at the time, and the fruit was badly damaged. By the autumn harvest that year, apple prices had bottomed out. By then, Liquan’s Fuji apples had already fallen behind – nowhere near the same level as the famous Luochuan apples and Baishui apples from our apple-producing province. More importantly, these fruit trees had been growing for thirty years; they were old trees, ravaged by Valsa canker, no longer capable of producing more and better fruit.

My father was thoroughly disillusioned with growing apples. That winter, he uprooted every last one of the apple trees and started growing grain on the land. Like my father, many people in the village made the same choice – digging up trees to grow grain.

◉ The land now replanted with grain.

Planting Fruit Trees Again

Growing grain follows a “two crops a year” rotation (note: in Shaanxi dialect; locally this generally means two harvests over three years). You plant wheat in autumn, harvest it the following June, then plant maize; the maize matures by autumn for harvest, and then wheat goes back in, and so the cycle continues. Compared with growing apples, grain farming saves a great deal of worry, time and effort. Once the seed is in the ground, apart from a few rounds of spraying and the necessary irrigation, there is barely anything else that needs doing in the fields. By the time the wheat and maize are ripe, the village always has a harvester coming round to help with the cut – no heavy lifting involved.

So once the fields switched to grain, many people in the village chose to leave and work elsewhere. During the busy farming season they would come back, finish the work, and then head out again. That was my father’s rhythm for the past couple of years. But he is getting on in years, and after a few seasons the employer simply could not keep him on any longer. So he became a full-time farmer once more, giving himself entirely to the land.

◉ The maize field that needs no fussing over.

Growing grain doesn’t require being in the fields all day. With the spare time on his hands, he found himself frequenting the mahjong parlour. Life was freer, certainly, but come harvest season his face would drop. Growing grain is undeniably a lot easier – but the hard truth is that you make no money from it.

My father started eyeing up the people who were still tending their fruit trees. He said, growing fruit is hard work, sure, but at the end of the year there is at least income to show for it, and in a good-price year you can make even more. Wheat and maize – that’s fine for your own table. But earning money? Forget about it!

He had done the sums carefully. Over these past few years, growing wheat and maize on the family’s land, once you deduct the hard costs – seed, chemical fertiliser, pesticides, machinery for ploughing, sowing and harvesting, and irrigation – the net income per mu comes to around 1,400 yuan a year. And that is only in a year of favourable weather. If drought or flood strikes, you cannot even scrape up that much. No matter how poor the fruit income, it still brings in five or six thousand yuan per mu; in a high-price year, over ten thousand per mu is perfectly normal.

So, true to his action-first nature, he could not wait to team up with my mother and plant fruit-tree seedlings in the four mu of field again. Only this time it was not apples – it was peaches and plums. In recent years, peaches and plums have become a hot, hard-to-come-by commodity. In a good market, a jin at the buying station can fetch as much as three or four yuan. Take peaches alone: the new varieties are so numerous they boggle the mind – all sorts of yellow peaches, flat peaches – and the quality is top-notch, so prices are naturally very high.

There was another factor in his thinking. Apart from the better prices, peaches and plums have a shorter growing cycle than apples. Apples take a long season – you do not harvest until September or October. Peaches and plums can be picked as early as May or June. They do not keep well and must be sold off quickly, but on balance they are less of a hassle than apples.

When it came to planting fruit trees again, my father and I – two different generations – actually had quite different ideas. Anyone who grows fruit knows that if you want your fruit to fetch a price, variety is everything. Back in the day, our family rode the variety wave of Qinguan and Fuji. This time, with the peaches and plums, I specifically got in touch with a skilled fruit-tree grower. He has connections with fruit-tree experts at the Yangling Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Shaanxi, and every time a new variety comes out, his orchard is among the first to put it into production at scale. I asked him to set aside some peach branches for us to graft with. But my father did not fancy the trip – it was too far – and was not willing to go and collect the scion wood. In the end, like most people, he simply went to a neighbour’s field in the next village to source his variety.

◉ Fruit trees planted among the grain.

Harvesting Wheat by Hand

Growing fruit trees is not an overnight job. Back when we grew apples, we first planted saplings in the wheat field; once the trees grew big, the wheat gave way. This time was the same – my father planted the saplings right in the middle of the wheat field, and four rows of saplings divided the field into five sections.

By the Dragon Boat Festival in 2025, the wheat in the field had turned gold. The saplings were not yet very tall, so they did not get in the way of the harvester. But the strip of land on the eastern side was too narrow for the machine to enter, so we had to cut the wheat by hand. My father, my mother, my sister and I formed a makeshift team. We took three sickles; three of us cut, while the other one tossed the cut sheaves onto the neighbouring plot, so that when the harvester came along it could cut and thresh them all together.

Most of Guanzhong went through a severe drought in the first half of that year. For over two months, not a drop of rain fell from the sky, and the sun baked the earth as if it were mad. Even though the neighbours watered their fields two or three times, the wheat’s growth was still far from satisfactory – every plant looked stunted, the stalks at least a third shorter than in previous years. Everyone said the wheat was bound to come up short. But the shorter stalks did have one advantage: they were easier to cut, and in that way they actually helped us.

We had barely been cutting for long before the sun grew fiercer and fiercer, beating down until our heads were buzzing. I was getting tired, so I straightened up from the wheat and said, “If only we’d known it was harvest day, we should have come out earlier to cut, while it was still cool. It’s just too hot and too bright now – a real torment.” My father said that in the morning there was still dew on the grain, so you absolutely could not cut; you had to wait until the sun had dried the wheat before the sickle could go in.

This stretch of field was not very long, and we finished it in no time. We cleared out the space in front of our door, ready to spread the freshly threshed wheat out to dry.

Hardly had we finished sweeping the ground clear when my father came back on the electric tricycle. The nearly five mu of field had yielded six full loads of wheat. The tricycle’s bed was packed to the brim with wheat kernels, the pale-yellow grains giving off that distinctive cereal smell. We tipped the grain out of the bed, then spread it thin with a pusher board and a wooden rake, laying it out to dry in front of the door.

Many neighbours came to help. This kind of mutual aid has now become a fixed practice among the wheat growers in the village: everyone pools together – first they harvest for your family, then they move on to mine, and last to his. From hauling the grain in from the field to spreading it out in front of the door, and even when a thunderstorm sweeps in and everyone rushes to get the wheat dried – it all works the same way.

This year, the fruit trees we newly planted have already begun to put out branches and leaves, taking on the basic shape of a proper fruit tree. The land available for wheat has shrunk a little compared with last year. We probably only planted three mu this year and harvested 800 jin of wheat. But because the season was better, we actually came in a hundred jin more than last year.

◉ The fruit trees planted that year, gradually growing.

Worries About the Future

By next year, the fruit trees should be bearing fruit. But who can guarantee the future of fruit growing? Even if peaches and plums fetch a good price now, what the market will look like in a few years – or longer – who can say for sure. Will they still be in short supply then? Will they still make money?

Looking at those saplings tucked between the rows of wheat, I could not help but tell my father about my worries. But he did not think that far ahead. Or rather, he did not want to think that far ahead – he just wanted to get the job in front of him done properly.

◉ The grown fruit trees.

I have another worry. In the early 1990s, my parents were young and full of strength; they could look forward to future earnings and a good life. But now they are closing in on seventy – how much passion and energy do they have left?

My classmate’s parents have been growing apples for years. They have several mu of orchard, and all their children are in the city, so the old couple manage it all themselves. In earlier years, at apple-picking time, the old folks could manage on their own. These past two years, though, his parents have been calling him back to help. His work is busy too; sometimes he can make it back, but when he really cannot get away, he asks his parents to hire help. But they find the cost too high and are reluctant. Then one year, while picking fruit, his mother slipped off the picking ladder. Fortunately it had just rained and the ground was soft, so nothing was seriously broken – just a fracture. She needed a few months to recover. In the end, he had to take leave and go back to help.

He has been urging his parents to stop growing fruit for years, but they refuse. He also has a younger brother, over thirty now, still unmarried. His parents are always eager to earn a bit more, thinking it might give them a better chance at a good match. Only once the younger son has a wife might they finally be able to give up the apples and settle down properly.

This is a problem at my family’s end too. Once you plant cash crops like fruit, the orchard becomes an enormous magnet, and the old fruit farmers are like grains of iron filings, drawn and stuck fast to it. All four seasons you are in the orchard – thinning the blossoms, thinning the fruit, weeding, loosening the soil, irrigating, fertilising, spraying, harvesting, pruning. Every task demands careful, attentive tending, and every task must be done with real physical effort. And not one of these jobs can truly be mechanised yet; they are all manual labour. I grew up working in the orchard with my parents, and I have been at it for over a decade. The hardship is still vivid in my memory. Even just those few days of harvesting – it takes a layer of skin off you. A full pair of baskets of apples weighs at least thirty jin, and you have to pass the load hand to hand at least four times. Picking, hauling, stacking – not one of it is easy.

And the cost of growing fruit keeps climbing. If the fruit does not sell well, you are quite likely to take a loss. Put everything else aside – the labour cost alone is staggering. Every year, at fruit-bagging and harvest time, growers with a reasonably sized orchard simply cannot keep up with just their own family. Hired-labour rates go up year on year, at least 120 yuan a day these days. These are real, hard costs in cash. Some people spend ten or twenty thousand yuan on hired help alone in a single season. Factor in all the other costs and it is almost unimaginable.

What the future holds, no one can say. You can hardly see any young people in the village these days – they have all gone to the provincial capital or other places to make their way. When this generation of parents steps off the stage of history, what fate will be left for this land?

– This is Foodthink’s original article No. 833 –

Foodthink

Author

Liu Lei

Born in 1984, a native of Liquan, Xianyang, Shaanxi. Long based in Xi’an, currently employed at a manufacturing firm in the city. Work has appeared in print publications such as Shanghai Story, Xi’an Daily, and Western Development, as well as on WeChat public-account platforms including NetEase Renjian, Yishitan, and Southern Weekly.

All images in this article are provided by the author.

Editor: Xiaodan

Layout: Xiaoshu

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