Her daughter, standing beside her on their two-hectare plot, muttered, “Another year of work for nothing.” Of the corn that had barely survived the summer drought in central China’s Henan province, only about a third made it through the autumn rains.
A few hundred meters away, Wan Jinhu’s 77 hectares took losses too, but still pulled in about 550 kilograms per mu (around 8.25 tons per hectare) — a harvest close to what smallholders manage in a normal year.Years of investment had built him a buffer: a drying tower, two tracked harvesters, a mobile dryer, and multiple seed varieties to hedge against whatever weather arrived. “The weather has been too strange, and margins are basically gone,” Wan said. “But if you expand, strengthen, and manage carefully, you can still make it work.”
