In May 1958, the Second Session of the Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China adopted the general line of “exerting all our efforts, striving for upstream, and building socialism with more speed and less effort” and put forward a series of slogans such as “work hard for three years and basically change the face of the country”. Immediately afterwards, a great leap forward movement was launched throughout the country. In the summer and autumn of that year, the whole country was “launching satellites and creating high yields”, and there were reports in the newspapers about grain yields of several thousand kilograms per mu everywhere. The slogan “How bold people are, how productive the land is” became a very popular slogan at that Time. In addition, the People’s Daily published an article by a famous scientist, in which it was said that according to scientific theory, it is possible to produce tens of thousands of pounds per mu. This makes people pursue the goal of locking in the mu yield of more than 10,000 jins.
In this situation, I was in the Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research (now the China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research) as the study of agricultural lifelines of water research institutions, it is natural to want to play their own advantages, to take the lead in creating new high-yield records; not to mention that our Institute also specializes in agricultural irrigation and drainage research institutes, there are senior technical personnel studying agriculture, planting high-yield test fields in the technical should be a bit of an advantage. In the fall of that year, the leadership of the hospital held a general meeting to mobilize all staff to fully commit to the wheat high-yield test field campaign (at that time, the important work in the form of “campaign”). The goal was to set a record yield of 200,000 pounds of wheat per acre on a 3-mu plot of land in our hospital.
Our hospital is located in Jing Wang Tomb, Haidian District, Beijing. In 1958, there was a dirt road that was not wide at the entrance of the hospital, and there were no buses yet. To the north of the dirt road was the train track from Xizhimen to Xihuangcun, and trains passed by from time to time. King Jing’s tomb was in the southeast of our hospital, only about two hundred meters apart. At that time, there were still graves left, and the two Chinese tables in front of the tomb were still standing high. Most of the area around our compound is farmland, mainly vegetable fields. There was a large open space in the courtyard, which was reserved for the construction of a temporary open-air test site. This environment is closer to the countryside than the current urban-rural combination, and is still suitable for growing crops.
The target of 200,000 pounds per acre was not imagined, but calculated with evidence. At that time, the first by the hospital leadership organized by the leading cadres, technical staff and personnel with agricultural experience of the three combined group, responsible for the development of the technical planning of the test field. After careful preparation, the three-integration team came up with a plan. The leaders of the institute sent it to the whole institute for discussion and comments. In this way, we, the general public, had the opportunity to see it. At that time, we discussed the plan very carefully within the group and put forward our opinions, and then each institute (there were about ten institutes in our institute at that time) and administrative department respectively summarized the opinions of their respective subordinate groups (there were about five or six groups in one institute or division) and submitted them to the planning group, and then they modified and enriched the original plan according to the opinions put forward by the whole institute. After the final approval by the head of the institute, it was put into practice as a formal plan. Due to its age and the many changes that the institution has undergone, it is now impossible to find this plan. Now, I can only record what I can recall from memory as follows, but many details are lost to memory.
The plan was prepared and implemented in accordance with the eight-character constitution of agriculture (soil, fertilizer, water, seed, density, protection, labor, and management).
Soil: At that time, there was an important lesson about soil: deep plowing. However, there was no clear standard of how deep is good. At that time, deep plowing was generally around one foot. The test field in our institute was required to be six feet (two meters). This could not be achieved in a large field. But ours was a test field, and it was within the compound of the institution, so it was possible to achieve it. The deep turning was done by all the employees of the institute with shovels. In order not to disrupt the original soil layer relationship, so that each layer of soil in the deep turning also remain in the original level (such as the surface layer of soil in the deep turning still in the surface layer, the bottom layer of soil in the deep turning still in the bottom layer), in the deep turning process, each foot as a layer, each layer of turned out soil to the pre-prepared place. Since the amount of excavated soil was not small (about 4,000 square meters), a light rail was laid on one side of the test field to transport the soil by bucket truck, which would reduce the amount of labor (otherwise it would have to be picked by people) and speed up the progress. After the bottom layer of soil was turned over (this layer did not need to be transported), the layers were then reset in order.
Fertilizer: “A crop of flowers depends on manure” was a popular slogan at that time. In order to accumulate organic fertilizer, our hospital spent a lot of effort to accumulate fertilizer outside the hospital, and the General Affairs Section was responsible for this work. In September of that year, we sent people and cars every day to buy horse manure and pig and sheep manure from the large car stores and pig and sheep pens in the area of Madian outside Deshengmen or Qinglongqiao in the north palace gate of the Summer Palace, and we also bought sheep urine in iron barrels (it is said that sheep urine is particularly good for wheat). The cars are rented from Beijing Automobile Factory No. 4 (the factory is only a few hundred meters away from our hospital), and the number of vehicles sent each day is uncertain, sometimes one or two, and sometimes three or four. In this way, the number of laborers needed every day is not fixed, and when the General Affairs Section does not have enough manpower, it asks for people to go with the vehicles to acquire. Every day, there are two shifts in the morning and evening to buy from each place. The collected manure and urine are piled up in the north side of the test field after finishing, and after mixing with the soil, they are added to each layer of soil in layers. The accumulation of manure will come to an end by the Fourth of July.
Water: We have an institute that specializes in irrigation and drainage, and they are responsible for managing all matters related to “water” to ensure that the soil moisture is always in the most favorable condition for the wheat. For this test field, no matter what the weather is like, the harvest will not be affected by water problems. Our institute was using water from our own well, which was very low cost.
Seeds: The best wheat seeds that could be collected at that time were chosen for high yield. To ensure that every seed was of high quality, the wheat seeds were screened by hand.
Dense: Dense planting is a key to ensure high yields, and careful calculations were made for this purpose. A seed can grow a few ears of wheat, a bunch of wheat ears can have how many grains of wheat, a grain of wheat is how much weight, an acre of land need to have how many ears of wheat to ensure an output of 200,000 pounds. After careful calculation, an acre of land needs a thousand pounds of seeds to ensure that the intended goal is reached. This way it was implemented according to this standard.
Management: For this new type of high-yield test field, there is no ready-made experience, and management becomes more important. In addition to traditional management measures, some innovative measures (such as playing Music) and measures that had to be taken depending on the growth of the wheat (adding ventilation facilities and erecting shelves) were adopted. They are described in more detail below.
As for “protection” and “work”, I don’t remember any special measures in this experimental field.
In the fall of 1958, our institute started to plant the test field. The first step was to deep-turn the land, which was the heaviest workload and the heaviest labor. All the employees (at that time there were several hundred male and female laborers, with male laborers being the majority) took turns according to the unified arrangement, and shoveled the soil step by step according to the plan – transported the soil – shoveled the soil – transported the soil. The land was about 50 to 60 meters long from east to west and 30 to 40 meters wide from north to south. A small railroad track was laid on the south side of the plot to transport the soil by bucket truck. There was a distance of 30 to 40 meters from the northern part of the plot to the railroad track, and each layer of soil was picked up by a person with a soil basket and loaded onto a bucket truck to be transported away. The bottom layer of soil did not need to be transported away, after a thorough turning. At this point, the land has become a large deep pit. Then, the soil is filled back in layers, and fertilizer is added at the same time. After the land was finished, the soil was even and soft, and the ground was as flat as a mirror (with a certain slope, of course), so it looked very decent. It was time for planting, and the whole plan was scheduled according to the agricultural time. After planting, people were expecting good seedlings to grow. As God would have it, the wheat seedlings just came out of the ground were good. As the seedlings continued to grow, the ground was like a green carpet, only the seedlings could be seen, but not the ground. As winter approached, the seedlings entered the overwintering period without anything particularly noteworthy happening.
In the spring of 1959, the wheat seedlings turned back to green. From the point of view of growth, the lush green wheat fields looked promising. Irrigation, fertilization, weeding, and other daily farm work were carried out by a specially formed team, and only when special needs arose did the general public participate in the field work. As the wheat saplings grew taller and taller, the wheat fields became dense. In order to let the air flow in the wheat field, we had to install blowers at the edge of the wheat field to send air to the field regularly. In addition, new technologies were adopted to increase production. At that time, there was information that making plants listen to music could increase yields. Our institute set up radio equipment at the edge of the test field and played music to the ears of wheat regularly every day when the stalks grew to a foot high. To increase light, several high-powered lights were set up at the edge of the field to be used at night. The wheat grew better and better, reaching a level of insane growth where the stalks were so dense that they could no longer stand on their own. In order to prevent collapse, special stanchions were erected to help the stalks stand. Because of the dense planting, it caused a lot of problems.
Anyway, the wheat was green and looked good growing. When the harvest season came, people carefully cut off each wheat ear with scissors to prevent losses, truly returning the grain to the barn. When the weighing was over, the results were a big disappointment, with only 1,500 pounds per acre (the exact number can no longer be remembered), a few hundred pounds per acre more than the seeds used, and the intended goal could not be compared.
In the process of planting the test field, as the wheat grows, people also have different reflections, these are not the scope of this article to cover.
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