JINAN, June 21 (Xinhua) - Wei Dedong, owner of the 200-hectare Fumin Family Farm in Linyi County in eastern Shandong Province, has a sickle that remains as sharp as it was more than a decade ago.
"It's not that I have taken great care of it, but it's just so rarely used these days," Wei said.
With the range of harvesting machinery available, Wei said his sickle is only used at the very edges of the field, about one mu (0.067 hectare) in area, where the machines have missed.
As China wraps up its summer harvest, particularly in wheat belt provinces such as Shandong, Henan and Anhui, machines have alleviated the burden on farmers.
The timing of the summer harvest is called "shuang qiang," or "two rushes," as farmers rush to harvest in order to make space for new crops, which must be planted before too late.
A common side effect of the summer harvest was severe back pain for farmers, who had to bend over to continually cut the wheat from near ground level. An old Chinese idiom describes the agricultural toil as "face to the soil and back to the sky."
The work was so overwhelming that primary and middle schools in rural northern China often gave students a two-week "wheat leave" to allow them to help with farm work.
"In the beginning, even the most primitive hand-held harvesters were rare in the fields," said Wang Min, who spent her childhood in northern Shandong province.
Today more than 90 percent of wheat in Wang's hometown, and across China, is harvested by machines.
"Wheat leave disappeared over a decade ago and has not been heard of since," Wang said.
Also gone is the sickle, which, despite appearing in the Bible and symbols of communist movements across the world, has been losing its role in Chinese agriculture.
"What used to be a month's labor is now finished in about ten days with a combine harvester," said Xia Xiaoguo, who drives a Lovol harvester in Jiaxiang County.
With seven out of ten harvesters in China manufactured by Lovol, the Shandong-based company now has an app that allows a harvester owner to rent the machine out to mobile users.
"It took a lot of time to find a harvester in the past, but now we can rent a harvester without leaving the house," said Zhang Jianguo, a farmer. "It's so convenient."
