Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

A phenomenally successful adaptation, wetland rice cultivation spread
across Asia, catalyzing dramatic population growth in regions ill suited for
previous farming practices. Yet even though the new system supported
more people, most still lived on the brink of starvation. Greater food production
didn’t mean that the poor had more to eat. It usually meant more
people to feed.
Geographer Walter Mallory found no shortage of ideas for addressing
China’s famines in the early 1920s. Civil engineers proposed controlling
rivers to alleviate crop-damaging floods. Agricultural engineers suggested
irrigation and land reclamation to increase cultivated acreage. Economists
proposed new banking methods to encourage investment of urban capital
in rural areas. Others with more overtly political agendas wanted to move
people from densely populated regions to the wide-open spaces of Mongolia.
Focused on treating symptoms, few addressed the root cause of overaggressive
cultivation of marginal land.
In 1920s China it took almost an acre (0.4 hectares) of land to feed a person
for a year. A third of all land holdings were less than half an acre—not
enough to feed a single person, let alone support a family. More than half
of individual land holdings covered less than an acre and a half, a reality
that kept the Chinese at perpetual risk of starvation. A bad year—failure
of a single crop—brought famine. China was at the limit of its capacity to
feed itself.
Obtaining food consumed 70 to 80 percent of an average family income.
Even so, the typical diet consisted of two meals of rice, bread, and
salt turnips. People survived from harvest to harvest.
Still, Mallory was impressed that peasant farmers maintained soil fertility
despite intensive cultivation for more than four thousand years. He
contrasted the longevity of Chinese agriculture with the rapid exhaustion
of American soils. The key appeared to be intensive organic fertilization by
returning human wastes from cities and towns to the fields. Without access
to chemical fertilizers Chinese peasants fertilized the land themselves. By
Mallory’s time, soil nutrients had been recycled through more than forty
generations of farmers and their fields.
In the 1920s famine-relief administrator Y. S. Djang investigated whether
people in provinces with abundant harvests ate more food than they
needed. It was considered an issue of national concern that some provinces
gorged while their neighbors starved.
One remarkable practice Djang found was prevalent in the province of
Shao-hsing (Shaoxing), where crops were reliable and abundant. He re-
dirty business 181