1 Interview group:

“We tried to make them as comfortable as possible and tried to go beyond agriculture: We asked about all kinds of constraints or problems they were having.  They would bring up different topics, such as education costs, rural/urban gaps, and lack of promised compensation for replacing staple food crops with trees to prevent erosion."

2 Buying versus saving seed: “This is a large regional grain exchange in Shandong Province for farmers and traders from the surrounding area. Because of changes in the Chinese seed industry and overall seed system, organizations are increasingly required to come up with their own funding for research and salaries. Many are now selling seed to raise funds. The focus is overwhelmingly on hybrid varieties due to the need to replace seed annually."

“There has not been a lot of emphasis in the Chinese research system on open-pollinated varieties [OPVs], but in Guangxi, a relatively poor province in southwestern China, people in many villages still eat maize as the primary staple and use it for livestock feed. A considerable percentage of the maize area is still planted with OPVs. Many farmers there felt the hybrids were not suitable for their often marginal growing conditions.”

3 Maize for livestock feed: “Most of the livestock in China continues to be raised on household farms like this one. Large-scale farms for cattle and pig production are still not common. In most of the country, farmers produce maize primarily to feed their animals and will often store it outside or in containers such as these homemade bins.”

Challenges to maize production, northeastern China: “In the northeast, where maize and soybeans are the main crops, the livestock industry hasn’t developed as much as in warmer parts of the country. Heat for the animals has just been too expensive. Maize is more important as an income source.  The northeast faces some unique challenges: the local market is fairly saturated, with part of the problem caused by transportation infrastructure. But moving maize from the northeast to other parts of China has often been more expensive than importing it from outside. With China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, domestic subsidies and other means of protection will be phased out, and the domestic market will open up to foreign production.  There is no question that there will be a maize influx."

“There are currently limited possibilities for utilization in the northeast and limited crop diversification possibilities because of climatic constraints. A big question is what is going to happen to farmers and production in that region.”

4 Farmers have very different opportunities: “Normally, they would already have planted maize between the rows of wheat shown here, but this was an exceptionally dry season and farmers were still waiting to plant. In many regions, farmers lay sheet plastic over the seedlings to trap moisture. and increase the temperature The price of the plastic varied greatly from region to region, and not all farmers were able to use this technique.

“Also, maize usually lost out in the competition for flat land to rice and higher value crops. Farmers use terracing to get as high up on the hillsides as they can—sometimes terraces are as narrow as 4–5 rows of maize.

“It’s important to remember that even within one village farmers are going to have different opportunities and different transactions costs.”

5 Using every inch of land: “This is a field in Sichuan, in the southwest. It’s incredibly diverse there and very fertile. Farmers use every inch of the land. Because Sichuan is one of the most populated provinces, the per capita arable land is one of the lowest in the country, but they get everything possible from it. Wheat is intercropped with vegetables and then maize with the wheat.  What you see here are mulberry trees for silkworms. They can harvest five or more crops a year from one field!

“We would drive along and even see maize squeezed between rocks on the hillside next to the road.”

6 Planting maize for food: “In many parts of China, people refuse to eat maize. One of my colleagues in these surveys grew up in the fifties. Almost all his family had to eat was steamed maize buns.  That’s all. To this day he won’t eat anything having to do with maize.

“Some villages we visited in Guangxi had recently switched from consuming predominantly maize to consuming more rice.  Part of it has to do with increasing economic status: rice is considered to be a higher-class food than maize. However, in cities, people have begun to eat sweet maize almost as a kind of gourmet snack.”