[AT] Farming in China was Old tractor wool-gathering...

[James Peck]

I recently attended a program by a speaker who was involved with building low tech water treatment facilities in China. Several factoids are:

The US and China have a comparable land area but China's population is multiple times higher.
Most of the arable land in China is towards the Pacific side. The west is desert.
Most of China's population is in the areas of arable land.
Most farm land in China is owned by villages. Those villages divvy the land up into small lots which village families can farm. Those small lots support the family.
China has laws that restrict converting farm land into urban sprawl.
To get land to build in urban areas, villages are rebuilt so that they have extra farm land which can be used to offset the land consumed in urban buildup.
The offset farmland in the villages can't be used to build water treatment facilities because its use is now restricted to agriculture.

My take: There is a lot of land in China that is not suitable for tractor farming. 

Francis Robinson aka "farmer" Central Indiana USA AT List Member <robinson46176 at gmail.com>; <snip> The thing that jumps out to me is the memory that a small farm of those days could provide for two families. We had hired hands in the early 1950's who lived here on the farm and one of them had a wife and 3 kids. I don't recall how much cash we paid him but part of his pay was a dwelling, heating oil, electric and vegetables from a large garden we kept.<snip>