The summer harvest season is coming to the Guanzhong region: modern machinery has defeated the need for manual labor

At the end of May, the Guanzhong region of Shaanxi has entered into the busy summer harvest season. As the old saying goes, the summer harvest is just like snatching food from the jaws of a tiger, the ripe rape and wheat must be harvested in good weather.

On May 31st, at Xinzhai Village, Puhua Town, Lantian County, the 60 year-old master Zhu held a sickle, making way for the combine harvester at the edge of the wheat field that was about start the harvest season. Not far away, the combine harvester was harvesting wheat for his neighbors.

Master Zhu is known as “Ba Shi” (the manual reaper), which translates as expert of wheat harvest. He looked at the combine harvester and smiled, “When I was young, a farm laborer could harvest more than 3 mu (about 0.5 acres) in one day!” But now, it takes no more than ten minutes for a reaper to harvest 0.2 acres of wheat. The reporter estimated that the harvesting speed of a reaper is twenty to thirty times that of manual harvesting.