Farming, then and now

In the US about 110 years ago, farmers used oxen and/or horses to pull the plow. They had some tools to help with planting, fertilising, and harvesting. Farms for crops couldn't be very large since there was only so much a farmer could do with a few oxen or horses. Of course, farms for cattle could be huge, since the cattle farmer could manage a lot of cattle and needed lots of grass for those cattle.

In China, only the richest farmers could afford an ox (they used both male and female oxen, used mainly for helping with the farming, pulling the plow or turning the pump that watered the crops). Most Chinese farmers had to do everything manually with primitive tools, so work was backbreaking and production was limited. Farms for livestock were few, most Chinese only got meat for Chinese New Year, if then.

In the US, about 50 years ago, most farmers had tractors to do the plowing and help with planting and fertilising. This meant farms for crops could be larger than with oxen or horses since a tractor could do much more than a team of oxen or horses. Farms for livestock got smaller, since the livestock were mostly fed packaged feed and kept from moving around much so they'd fatten up quicker than walking around looking for grass.

In China, not much had changed.

I saw a video about a modern American farmer, a rather elderly man, who took a book with him and got into his tractor, which had a compartment for a human driver that had A/C for hot weather and a heater for cold weather, and maybe space for a passenger/companion for the driver, but the driver wasn't really needed, the tractor could do everything all by itself, but, having had to drive a tractor for many years, sometimes the old farmer just liked to get in his modern, fully automatic tractor and ride as it did the plowing, planting, fertilising,  harvesting, and just about everything else that needed to be done to raise the crops for which it was designed.

And now the Chinese farmers have similar or even better tractors. The job of the modern farmer is to sit in the control room for the farm and push the appropriate buttons, turn the appropriate knobs, and type the appropriate commands into the computer that is running the farm, and this is true in the US and the PRC.

Both the PRC and India have packed about 1.4 billion people into a tiny area, both countries have only one time zone, so about a quarter the size of the CONUS (well, actually the PRC and Indian time zones are somewhat larger than a US time zone, but still, only one time zone in each country, while Russia have 11 time zones and the United States have a total of 6).

The PRC now have enough money to buy a lot of their food from countries that sell food cheaply, so that includes the US on and off, depending on what obstacles the US government put in that help or hurt the US farmers (who don't have all that many votes, so what they want isn't a top US government priority). The PRC is looking at Brazil, the Antipodes, Africa, just about anywhere they can buy food. Meat is everywhere. I saw a Chinese character that wasn't in my 1990 Oxford Chinese-English Dictionary, the character 串 (chuàn) which now, on a restaurant sign, means kebab, and there are a lot of kebab shops in China now, something that wasn't there in 1990. The character originally meant, 'string together' and someone decided that a kebab means that someone will string together some meat to make the kebab.

The Chinese oxen were tiny, bred to eat as little as possible, so the cows produce barely enough milk for the calves. So, fifty years ago, China had no dairy products. Now, there is milk in the PRC, not a lot of it since older Chinese never had it before, and figure it is mostly for children. Just 50 years ago, most PRC children had barely enough to eat and no dairy, so not much calcium or protein. So one thing I notice is how much taller the younger Chinese adults are than the older Chinese. 

Twenty years ago, pizza had just gotten to China. It was too expensive for most Chinese, but the upper class Chinese wanted to show me their pizza back then.

Now, ordinary Chinese can afford pizza, and like things like durian pizza, which is an acquired taste, and is preferably eaten when one has a bad cold, since durian can have a rather strong 'aroma' (to use the polite term).

Quite the change in farming over the last 50 years in the US and the PRC, but the change is much more noticeable in the PRC. In the US, farmers went from old tractors that the farmer had to drive to modern tractors that drive themselves, while Chinese farmers went from mostly manual farming to tractors as advanced, or even more advanced than those used by modern American farmers.