Food for All - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 99

Ecological Reconstruction in China
Bei Guan village lies in the rolling hills and plains of Yanqing County,
under the shadow of the Great Wall of China. It is the site of a remarkable
experiment in integrating sustainable agriculture with renewable energy
production. Bei Guan was selected by the ministry of agriculture as an
ecological demonstration village for implementing integrated farming
systems in one of 150 counties across the country. 33 It has made the
transition from monocultural maize cultivation to diverse vegetable, pig
and poultry production. Each of the 350 households has a tiny plot of
land, about 2 mu (one seventh of a hectare), a pen for the livestock, and
a biogas digester. Ten types of vegetable are grown and sold directly into
Beijing markets. The green wastes are fed to the animals, and their wastes
are channelled into the digester. This produces methane gas for cooking,
lighting and heating, and the solids from the digester are used to fertilize
the soil. Each farmer also uses plastic sheeting to create greenhouses from
the end of August to May, thus extending production through the biting
winter when temperatures regularly fall to minus 30 degrees Centigrade.
The benefits for local people and the environment are substantial -
more income from the vegetables, better and more diverse food, reduced
costs for fertilizers, reduced workload for women, and better living
conditions in the house and kitchen. In Bei Guan, there is also a straw
gasification plant that uses only maize husks to produce gas in order to
supplement household production. Instead of burning husks in inefficient
stoves, requiring 500 baskets per day for the whole village, just 20 are
burned per day in the plant. The village head, Lei Zheng Kuan, says: 'These
have saved us a lot of time. Before, women had to rush back from the fields to collect wood
or husks, and if it had been raining, the whole house would be full of smoke. Now it is so
clean and easy.'
The benefits of these systems are far reaching. The ministry of
agriculture promotes a variety of integrated models across the country,
involving mixtures of biogas digesters, fruit and vegetable gardens,
underground water tanks, solar greenhouses, solar stoves and heaters, and
pigs and poultry. These are fitted to local conditions. As Wang Jiuchen,
director of the ministry's division of renewable energy, says: 'If farmers do
not participate in this ecological reconstruction, it will not work.' Whole integrated
systems are now being demonstrated across many regions of China, and
altogether 8.5 million households have digesters. The target for the coming
decade is the construction of another 1 million digesters per year. Because
the systems of waste digestion and energy production substitute for fuel
wood, coal or inefficient crop-residue burning, the benefits for the natural
environment are substantial - each digester saves the equivalent of 1.5