The Chinese have been cultivating rice for more than 8,000 years. Grain – the nation's most important staple – is imbued with cultural significance.

After the Labor Day holiday, China's grain granary, Heilongjiang Province, enters rice planting season. The province's progress in raising crop yields has contributed a substantial share to China's unprecedented string of increases in grain production over the years. However, as more people move to the cities, finding skilled labor is a major challenge in agriculture. The Global Harvest Initiative in the United States estimated that from 2005 to 2019, the agriculture workforce fell by about 58 million people, or roughly 11 percent.

Jiansanjiang, an important grain production base in Heilongjiang has worked out a solution for skilled labor shortages, especially for rice transplanting. The peak season for it usually begins in May and lasts about two to three weeks. Local farms there encourage farmers from nearby villages to take up temporary shifts for rice transplanting; a good way for migrant workers to earn extra cash before the summer, which is a peak hiring season in big cities.

Zhang Yunhe, a migrant worker from Suihua county, says he took on a temporary rice transplanting job in Jiansanjiang every May for nearly 20 years. The three-week gig now gives him nearly 1,000 U.S. dollars, which is considered a decent amount for migrant workers like him.

Transplanting is the most common and elaborative method of crop establishment for rice in Asia. Rice seedlings grown in a nursery are pulled and transplanted into puddled and leveled fields 15 to 40 days after seeding. Rice seedlings can either be transplanted manually or by machine. This is done in order to get higher yields and to minimize weeding.

The high level of agricultural modernization across Heilongjiang in recent years has resulted in less of a need for manual rice transplanting. Skilled farmers like Zhang are now hired to operate machines in the croplands.

Nearly 50,000 farmers from nearby cities arrived in Jiansanjiang for rice transplanting during the first week of May. The local railway bureau has arranged extra trains to ease such transportation bottlenecks.

(Cover: Migrant workers from Heilongjiang province rush to Jiansanjiang, an important grain production base for the plowing season. /CGTN Photo)