A ‘rescue’ won against rain
Huang Lanlan and Lin Xiaoyi
This year marks the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Over the past century, the Party has led China through profound transformations: from national peril to national rejuvenation, from bare subsistence to moderate prosperity, from technological catch-up to independent innovation and from isolation and underdevelopment to greater educational equity. Generation after generation of CPC members, through their unwavering commitment, have written an epic of uplifting the destiny of the Chinese nation, the well-being of its people and the course of national development.
July 1 marks the CPC’s founding anniversary. On this occasion, the Global Times is launching a special series, “105 Years of Uplift,” to explore the deeper answer to the question of why the CPC has succeeded. The second installment looks at how, in the face of extreme weather, the Party supported farmers to save a wheat harvest and, in doing so, upheld the fundamental promise of food security for hundreds of millions.
The sky had turned overcast again. Wang Yongzhong looked up at the gathering mass of gray clouds. A wind blew in from the fields, carrying the scent of ripening wheat – and with it, a trace of anxiety.
More than 66.7 hectares of Wang’s wheat were still standing in the fields, while the weather forecast warned that a new round of torrential rain was heading toward his home in Xiangyang, Central China’s Hubei Province.
Since mid-May, more than 300,000 hectares of wheat in Xiangyang had ripened all at once, only to be met by a rare spell of consecutive rainy days. According to local media reports, if the crop was not harvested urgently, a year’s worth of farmers’ hard work could go to waste – affecting the livelihoods of countless farming families involved, and, more fundamentally, posing a threat to the nation’s food security.
But Wang, like many other farmers in Xiangyang, did not have to worry for long. Before the wheat harvest began, meeting rooms in many grassroots CPC organizations across the city were brightly lit as the Party members and officials discussed how to better help farmers bring in the crop. Local power utility workers also inventoried lighting equipment and prepared to head into the wheat fields through the night. Also, hundreds of kilometers away, combine harvester operators from across the country started their engines as they received calls for help from Xiangyang.
In the end, the race against the downpour – a “battle” to save the grain – was won through the efforts of all sides. Local farmers’ anxiety gave way to the steady reassurance of a bumper harvest.
In Wang’s eyes, it was numerous hands, lights and roaring machines that together uplifted the bowls of rice in Xiangyang safely out of the rain.
“If it hadn’t been for the support of the Party and the government, and the help that came from all directions, my wheat might still be stuck in the mud right now,” Wang told the Global Times.
A three-day and two-night ‘battle’
Wang is a grain farmer in Nanzhang County of Xiangyang. Nestled in the rolling hills of northwestern Xiangyang, Nanzhang depends heavily on wheat, which is one of the key sources of annual income for local farm households.
In Xiangyang, the wheat crop had been looking exceptionally strong this year, raising hopes for a bumper harvest. But in mid-May, several days of continuous rain arrived. Mature wheat ears were soaked in the downpour, and the risks of lodging, sprouting and mildew rose by the day. Wang paced back and forth at the edge of his fields, anxious and restless. He knew all too well that, if the harvest were delayed any longer, a season’s worth of hard work could come to nothing.
He was not alone in his worry. Across Xiangyang, a total of 357,000 hectares of wheat might face the same fate.
“We could see the golden heads of wheat in the fields, but we couldn’t harvest them. That made us anxious,” recalled Liu Fan. As Party secretary of Huanglong Town in Xiangyang, he felt the pressure immediately: if the town’s more than 8,000 hectares of wheat could not be harvested on time, yields would fall, and the price of sprouted wheat would also drop sharply.
Everyone was waiting for the rain to stop. Finally, the local meteorological department identified a precious window: from May 21 to 23, a stretch of three days and two nights with no rain, possibly the only chance to rush the wheat harvest.
“At that point, we decided to make the most of those three days and two nights,” Liu told the Global Times.
A 72-hour wheat-harvest “battle” unfolded across Xiangyang’s briefly clear skies.
In Huanglong Town, grassroots Party members and officials worked together to clear field roads and dredge drainage ditches, ensuring farm machinery could get into the fields. The town also opened many public facilities, providing a place for the more than 170 combine harvesters that arrived from outside the region to rest, as well as hot and cold showers and free daily necessity kits.
“During those days, there was no such thing as clocking in or out. Wherever there was a need, that was where we went,” Liu said. For them, during those days, it was normal to still be tallying unharvested wheat plots after midnight and then be back in the fields at dawn.
In Nanzhang, Wang was working just as hard. In addition to being a major grain grower, Wang also heads an agricultural cooperative that pools and markets grain from local farmers. Drawing on a network he had built up over the years, Wang urgently contacted dozens of combine harvesters and their operators from nearby provinces.
The scene in the wheat fields moved many people. Late at night, the lights of harvesters traced shifting ribbons across the farmland, while the roar of machinery cut through the damp air. Farmers stood on the field ridges, watching combine harvesters with out-of-province license plates drive into their fields one after another. The shift in their expressions, from anxiety to relief, did not go unnoticed by local Party and government officials.
Over the course of three days and two nights, more than 90 percent of Huanglong Town’s wheat was harvested and safely brought in. Liu said he could finally breathe a sigh of relief. “It was the result of coordinated efforts by the Party and government, harvester operators, farmers and all the support teams working together,” he told the Global Times.
‘Invisible’ backbones
In just three days and two nights, 90 percent of the wheat harvest was saved, effectively compressing a typical 10- to 15-day harvesting cycle into that brief window, Liu explained. This was not only a victory of coordination among all parties involved, but also a vivid example of how grassroots ingenuity and technology are coming together to empower China’s agriculture, he said.
Nonetheless, getting the wheat in was only half the battle. What to do with the wet grain was just as critical in determining whether the harvest could truly be secured.
This year, the wheat collected in Xiangyang generally reached 50-percent moisture – the highest level in recent years. “If it wasn’t dried or properly stored in time, the combination of high moisture and early-summer heat would cause the grain to heat up and ferment within hours, leading to sprouting and mold,” Wang told the Global Times.
In response, Wang came up with an inventive solution: “ground cage” cooling. He laid large “cages” with perforated ventilation channels across the warehouse floor, stacked the wet grain on the “cages,” and used blowers to continuously send in cool air, keeping the temperature of the grain pile below the fermentation threshold.
“As long as the temperature doesn’t rise, the wheat won’t mildew,” Wang said. The method extended the preservation window for wet grain from the usual 48 hours to more than 72 hours, buying precious time for drying.
Behind the scenes, power supply is also an invisible backbone of this grain-rescue campaign.
In Zaoyang City of Xiangyang, 15 Party-member service teams with more than 160 frontline members from Zaoyang Power Supply Company under State Grid Corporation of China were on standby around the clock. Over those three days and two nights, 263 grain-drying enterprises in Zaoyang received one-to-one electricity support.
Power cuts were strictly ruled out; if a fault occurred, mobile generators were immediately deployed as a backup, said Chen Guohua, deputy director of the operations and maintenance department at the company. ng grain was not confined to Xiangyang.
