My advisor Josh is in town for the week. Nina, John and I went out with him for a few days to see a project site for the Sloping Land Conversion Program, in Baoshan prefecture on the western border of Yunnan. The Baoshan area is famous for its Little Green Bean, which has a tan skin and bright green interior. They're served roasted, bursting through their skins, as a snack food. As we drove into town from the airport we saw rice paddies in the flatlands and around each paddy a couple rows of beans on the border. Also on our drive we saw mulberries planted in the lowlands next to corn flats and rice paddies. People keep silkworms near their homes and harvest mulberry leaves to feed them through the season, coppicing the bushes every winter.
That afternoon we spoke with the director of the local Forestry Bureau, a jovial guy who traded jibes with Josh through the translator and told us a lot about the program and its implementation. The following day we went to check out some project sites that were converted beginning ten years ago, in 1998. At that time SLCP was just a local project and farmers received only free seedlings, not cash or grain for retiring their cropland. We saw densely planted ten-year-old stands of tiny Yunnan and Chinese White (armandii) pine trees, species apparently not so well suited for the altitude, over 7500'. Last year this area saw thick snow cover. In some vacant spaces among the pines were planted a handful of other broadleaf species, including alder, maple, and rhodedendron, to introduce diversity and test for suitability.
Our guide from the forestry bureau, Mr Yang, told us the fields we were walking through used to be planted in buckwheat, but the people from the village lived half an hour away, and buckwheat is a very low-yielding crop, especially in these poor soil and climatic conditions. The villagers were ready to give it up planting it and let the land go to trees, so they jumped at the chance for free seedlings. Further up the hill we got to what is called "barren mountain" or wasteland, where the soil is so poor no crops were ever grown there. It had been planted to pine trees three times since the seventies, and practically everything had died. Now they were experimenting with a hardy cedar, and some trees we saw looked pretty good at three or four years old.
Then we went to see an "economic forest," so defined by the national SLCP program that began here in 2002. Farmers plant fruit or nut trees and are allowed to continue cropping in the understory as the trees grow. Apparently they are only allowed to plant low-stature species such as bush beans, sweet potatoes, and a parsnip-like medicinal plant. But we also saw corn, pole beans, and sunflowers elbowing out the pear seedlings. There were quite a few walnut trees; apparently walnuts fetch a good market price and farmers have begun to choose that species over the pear that was initially pushed by the government.
As you can see by the photos, our weather wasn't the best, but we got a decent idea of the lay of the land. Fog and meat goats going up to pasture.
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