In the Year of the Tiger
Mom found this beautiful
book being discarded from her local library. I can't imagine why
they'd get rid of such a fascinating text --- maybe because In
the Year of the Tiger
didn't fit into the children's section since it's really a
photojournalistic study for adults? I know I probably wouldn't
have gotten much out if it in fourth grade.
There's no real plot,
just amazing images from a Chinese village in the 1980s with
explanations of what's going on. This page says: "Another old
man, determined to be of uses, salvages every last grain from his son's
new rice cutting as he sieves the dregs through a fine-mesh straw
basket."
After this great shot of
ducks being herded home, the author explains that chickens are very
common in China but their meat is considered a delicacy despite the
animals' ubiquity. Most of the chickens are layers primarily kept
for their eggs.
The section on making
peanut oil in a hollowed out log, and then selling the cakes of
leftover peanut fiber for animal feed, was rivetting.
Here's a pedal-powered
threshing machine. One person can stand there and pump the pedal
while feeding in the grain. The same family had a separate
machine for winnowing the rice from the chaff that was very simple ---
just a place where you feed the chaffy grain into a chamber and a fan
pushes the chaff into one chute while the rice falls down another chute.
Overall, the book is
like Farmers
of Forty Centuries,
but more recent and with a lot more photos. I read In
the Year of the Tiger slowly over the course of a
couple of weeks and ended up feeling like I'd enjoyed a Chinese
farm-tour. If you ever stumble across a copy, I highly recommend
giving it a read.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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While previous recommendations here have sent me to the local library, this is the first time I immediately searched, found, and bought a used book online after reading one of your posts.
I'm going to call it a purchase for work, since I'm working on a project to identify technology for smallholder farmers globally and help them to access it. China is definitely a source of technology we are looking towards - both today's cutting edge innovations, as well as various stages of the more recent agricultural past.