Daily Life in China                  

Changde Hunan Countryside:

Boat.  That's not a shed it's someones home who's currently out working the farm.

The lines in the water are bottles.  A pod with a baby crab or shrimp is suspended form 4 bottles and they are connected to another set to make rows.  The pods stay in the water and the shrimp feed from the water flowing by.  In the foreground is a trap for large.

Grand farther, farther and sun harvesting fish from a drained fish farm pool.

Duck hurder walking his ducks.  The ducks like the pests that grow in the rice fields so the hurder walks his ducks from farm to farm so they can forage the pests.  The farmer  likes it and the duck keeper gets his flock fed for free.

Farmer electroshocking fish and eels.  That's a battery on his back and the ends of the electrodes run to the tips of the poles he dips into the water. 

Fish farm pond walls being spruced up for the coming season.

This is a big pong and they are all over centeral China and probably the whole of China.  There's a lot of food waste and it's all collected.  One cycle is feeding it to pigs.  The waste get ground to a thich soup, boiled then fed to the pigs.  The pig droppings are put into the ponds as I'm told for food.  It may be it's fertalizer for smaller animals that the fish eat but the two farmers told me it was food.  ?? Possibly a mistake in translation.

China is filled with nice looking farms like this.  No big farms.  The average farm is 4-9 mu which is very small.  The average American farm is 800 mu and usually supports fewer people than a Chinese farm.  So farming in China must be efficient.  That equates to lots of time and hard work without machines.  In Hunan it was common to see a farmer dragging his own plough, no ox even.  But the land where that's done is soft and breaking it not so difficult.  The farmers are in tremendous shape. 

Nursery probably for a village but could be owned by one person.  There are people who somehow wheel deals with villages or farmers and consolidate large sections for land for specific crops or at times a tree nursery. 

Land is at a premium so no lawns to mow.  Also no place for the kids to play except the street.  As far as you can see it's farms and the row of houses in the distance line another road.  Past that it's the same thing, farms extending quite a way until the next road.  There is very little extra land for anything other than growing food.  Well, at least that's in the flat parts of Hunan.

Village family with mom doing laundry.