Sowing Seeds: The Xinlong Greenhouses
by Linda Griffin
August 23, 2003
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"Cucumbers. Peas. Beans. Radishes. Asparagus. Spinach…" The young Tibetan woman proudly pointed her way down the neat rows of seedlings inside the greenhouses. The little green plants looked pretty ordinary, but they pose a dramatic change to the livelihood and diet of the farmers taking part in this micro-credit program in the remote valley of Xinlong (Nyarong).
Vegetable cultivation is new here. Nearly all the lower slopes alongside the Yalong River are planted with barley and wheat, while the higher pastures are used for grazing yaks and goats. The local diet is accordingly monotonous: most people subsist on tsampa (roasted barley flour), thick wheat noodles and a little dried yak meat. Vegetables, trucked up from Kangding and the Sichuanese lowlands, are available in the county town, but the high prices are beyond the means of Tibetan farmers. At best a few shreds of cabbage might find their way into the noodles.
"Vegetables are for city people! We've never been able to afford that stuff," laughed A-Ge, who at 47 is the oldest of the ten women participating in this year's pilot project. Growing vegetables locally promises double economic benefits: it will bring down market prices so that more people can afford them, while exponentially boosting farmers' income. "For barley and wheat we get only 5 or 6 mao per jin" (about 6-7 US cents/lb) said A-Ge. "These vegetables will fetch 2 or 3 yuan" (25-38 cents).
In fact, with strong sunlight and fertile soil, Xinlong and other areas of Kham are well suited to vegetable cultivation. The problem is, the frost-free season is short. Winter lasts for more than half the year. The solution is, of course, greenhouses. Increasingly the local government is investing in model greenhouse sites around Kham, in the hope of developing this lucrative sector to alleviate rural poverty. So far progress has been limited. The materials and expertise, brought in from the outside, are costly. Plots inside the model greenhouses are mostly rented out to a select number of farmers who can keep the profit after rent, but will never own the means of production.
In collaboration with the Xinlong county government, Kham Aid has embarked on something a little different. Ten families have been selected from Duxi, a farming village near the Yalong River, and greenhouses have been built on land already owned by them. The greenhouses are made from plastic stretched over arched steel frames, a compromise between the more costly high-tech designs preferred by the government and the fragile wood-plastic covers improvised by farmers in some parts of Kham for summer cultivation only. Training and ongoing supervision are provided by the government, but the families must pay back the cost of the greenhouse materials, tools and seeds over a five-year period (interest-free). When repayment is complete, the greenhouses will belong to them and all profit is theirs to keep. The repaid money will go into a revolving fund, with new families joining the program each year. By 2007, 19 families will be running their own greenhouses. During a wind-down phase after that, eight local schools will be provided with greenhouses free of cost to grow vegetables for boarding students.
Despite the glowing profit predictions, it is a bold step for the farmers to take on this loan commitment. "We are excited to have this opportunity, but we're nervous too. None of us has grown vegetables before, and there are a lot of new methods to learn," said Ngawang, the village head of Duxi. All ten of the women representing the families have been educated to at least primary school level, but in practice few can read well and most have difficulties understanding Chinese or even Tibetan dialects from outside Nyarong. Local translators were needed for the training, and technical concepts were demonstrated rather than taught. "The training was very hands-on," said Mr Ou, director of the county Agriculture Bureau. "We took them into the greenhouse, showed them fertilizer and said 'You put this into the ground, like this.' If we just sat in a classroom and tried to explain they might not understand."
Greenhouses are new territory for Kham Aid and the government has only been building them for a couple of years, so the program has not been without its teething problems. At the start of the program it turned out that the summer midday temperatures inside the greenhouses are high enough to roast the seeds, so the farmers now have to unhitch and roll up the plastic every morning. And in the winter they will need special heat-retention covers to stop the ground from freezing overnight, an additional cost that Kham Aid is trying to raise. The local government is doing its bit, putting in irrigation channels and a perimeter wall to stop livestock wandering through the site.
For now, everyone is looking forward to the first harvest, which will come in October. "All the other local farmers are envious. They all want to start greenhouses too," said Ngawang.