GATOU VILLAGE: A GOAT PROJECT AMONG THE YI

OF XIDE COUNTY, SICHUAN PROVINCE, CHINA

PAMELA LEONARD AND CHEN TAIYONG[1]

At first glance you might think that the Yi People who live in Xide county are living the same traditional life they have lived for generations. One of the 53 minority nationalities of China, they live in a rugged mountainous area of western Sichuan. They dress in elaborate wool embroidered clothes that they manufacture themselves. Their houses are deeply traditional in their use of space and they are constructed from the mud around them. There is not an abundance of purchased goods apparent in their daily life. Nearly half of the children in the villages, at the discretion of their parents, do not go to primary school and so begin to learn early the tasks and the knowledge that have been passed down in a less formal way from one generation to the next. Heifer Project International has a project in two Yi villages, and in one of these, Gatou village, the strategy adopted to help farmers involves the purchase of a breed of native black goat that has been raised in that village for generations. And yet the changes of the last half a century are vast and deep.

A RESOURCE HISTORY

At the most basic level, the resource profile available to the people here has changed as a result of ecological changes and new technologies. Understanding these changes helps put the needs of these rugged farmers in perspective--to see where they have come from and where they might be headed and it helps us understand how a livestock project can help them along that road.

Xide has experienced deforestation in the past fifty odd years and with the forests, disappeared certain long held traditions, for example maintaining forest reserves. Once there were areas in the village and also areas further off where dead were cremated which the Yi held sacrosanct and no one was permitted to cut the trees there. All but gone are the game that used to be a regular source of medicine and meat for the local people. Director Hu, a 58 year old native of Gatou village who now works in the Provincial Bureau of Animal Husbandry, remembers how they would use hunting dogs and a variety of trapping methods to catch everything from deer to tiger.

In Gatou village itself a landslide and flood took away more than half of their precious rice land in 1985. It also transformed their river so there are no longer the fish that the villagers once liked to eat. Just as striking is the dramatic population rise: in 1950 Gatou had 30 families and 150 to 160 people; now there are 159 families with 606 people.

There are a variety of immediate causes given for the transformation of the region's marginal lands from being relatively well forested to the now ubiquitous scrub and grassland. Before the communists took over the area, the torching of forest land is said to have been an occasional battle tactic of the Yi People in their internal conflicts. In Gatou there is no immediate memory of this happening to the forests that used to occupy the mountains above the village, and Director Hu doubts it happened very often,

the Yi people loved their trees. They used them to keep warm and to build their houses. I have heard stories passed down that such battles did happen, but I have no memory of specific examples near my home. I think it must have happened very little. The big deep forests we never cut; traditionally we only cut brush land. People would have ridiculed you if you damaged the big forest and trees.

In 1939 the Kuomintang is said to have burnt vast tracts of forest near the neighboring county of Xichang because the soldiers, living on that plain, were afraid of being raided by the local Yi minority who used the forest for cover. Xide fared better in this period because the General in this area, Deng Xiu Ting, was fond of the forests and helped protect them.

In 1950 Xide was "liberated" and became part of the Communist Chinese nation. A sort of pax sinica followed and internal strife settled down as law and order took hold and better health care developed. The conditions for rapid population growth were set in place. Following the Democratic Reform Policy of 1956, the Yi people were drawn into the vortex of the new strongly centralized state--slavery was abolished and the area now kept pace with the trends that shaped all of China in the following periods.

In 1959 a "backyard furnace" to produce steel was set up below Gatou village as part of the "Great Leap Forward" movement in China of that period. This was a dramatic but futile attempt to raise "like a satellite" China's steel production through the creation of small furnaces in many towns and villages all across China. Today old men point to the deep scars in the soil that keep the memory in the hills adjacent. The crevices were begun when logs cut from the hillside were dragged down along mud shoots to be burned for charcoal below. With the reduction in vegetation, the cuts have slowly worn deeper. The deforestation carried out in 1959 is thought to be the most dramatic step in the transformation of this area from forest to open land.

While Xide, unlike other places, never had a timber industry, a number of factors conspired to more or less complete the job of deforestation. One problem was forest fires, caused both by lightning and human accident. Furthermore, whereas forest land in the past had been privately owned, now it belonged to the collective and little effort was put toward controlling its destruction--people freely cut the trees they wanted. Trees were cut for fencing and for burning among other things. Traditional practices were open to question during the political movements of the 60s and 70s and the old village rules no longer held sway; even the sacred reserves were cut.

That that initial cutting of the forest in 1959 tended to cover large swaths no doubt hampered regeneration but other influences also must be considered. At the most basic level there is population. While the population had decreased in the wake of the great famine of 1960-1962, following that the population began its spectacular rise. That population needed to be fed and eventually developed into the labor to work at it. Both policy and necessity have laid emphasis on grain production. In many places, once the forest was cut, the stumps would be dug, the leftovers burned and grain crops planted for whatever period that land could support. The local Yi people had a long established tradition of cutting and burning brush land to fertilize fields in a rotational pattern of cropping and grazing--before that had been sustainable but with dwindling forest reserves and increasing population, it may have ended hopes for regeneration.

Lest this seem too bleak a picture, it needs to be pointed out that while still very poor, on the whole, the people feel they have seen great strides forward in their lifetime and have plenty to be optimistic about. Slavery and banditry were the worst of the old oppressors, and not infrequently they combined and a family might have their children stolen and sold away in stories of untold pain. Since liberation, there has been some steady progress against the general menace of poverty. At the most basic level, production in the old days was very uneven and in a bad year there was little relief and no security. In addition, transportation has brought new markets to the area and the policies of the 50s, 60s and 70s brought great strides in health care. Adijiadu of Jida village remembers how in the old days clothes were often made of tree bark and they had little opportunity for communication with larger towns and cities; now there are roads, buses and railroads and the young people wear nice clothing. While electricity is still in short supply, a few villagers now have big radios with which to entertain and to dance and there is real hope that more improvements are coming their way.

GATOU VILLAGE

Pasture around Gatou today is characterized by steep hillsides and a variety of bushes and little grass; sage brush dominates. Locals feel there is plenty of untapped brush land to accommodate the further development of their goat herds. Whereas current herd size averages around 15 in project families, of which there are 30 in this village; herding families indicated their ideal is to progress to 30 or 40 animals each. They feel overgrazing by goats in select spots on these hills has not damaged the general character of the land in its current state, "if you graze them down, after a time, the bushes still come back as vigorous as ever." Still, they acknowledge, the wild resource is not as abundant as it was fifty or forty years ago.

Then they had more bottom land for one thing. In 1985 that torrential rain washed away half the villages precious paddy land. The mountains of this area have always experienced severe erosion, even when the area was forested. This area gets 1,005 millimeters of rain a year, and 97% falls during just three months. Very hard localized thunder storms come suddenly and intensely. Deep crevices and mud flows are left in their wake, at times as deep as 30 meters. The mountains here are constructed of porous soil and loose rock which crumbles and flows under the force of these storms. Even when there is good vegetative growth, the soil moves under it. Indeed, the traditional Yi torch festival is part of a ritual tradition to try to ward off such devastating storms. Such intense storms may be expected in a place every 50 or 100 years. Even given that the problem always existed, now the effect is also, no doubt, magnified by the interim deforestation and one can hear people commenting "now everywhere there are landslides."

In the particular flood that struck Gatou in 1985, it is generally considered that deforestation was not the major influence. Upstream, a landslide on a steep slope tumbled down damming the river, and then suddenly that dam burst and the rock and water poured forth. Half of the villages total paddy land was washed away and when the water receded a boulder strewn flat was left to take its place. Before the river had been narrower and deeper and fish were plentiful. Now there are none.

One farmer, fifty-four year old SaMa WuGa helped us to learn much about the changes that have taken place in the pasture areas in his lifetime. After the flood the farmers became dependent on marginal lands around the village for their grain cropping; land that had once been used for grazing was now put to basic agriculture. The goats now have to be herded more carefully to prevent them from getting into the crops. Other long-term changes in the margins have also had an effect on goat husbandry. When the upper hills were covered with trees, the lower marginal lands had had an abundance of a kind of beech tree which, when cut back, can sprout like a bush and whose abundant leaves are succulent winter forage for goats. Another formerly important winter food, a non-toxic species of Rhododendron which grew locally, has also been affected by deforestation. As a result of the decreased browse, the farmers are being taught to move out to graze earlier in the spring and so the pasture has a shorter rest period than was traditional. Finally, in the past, such marginal grazing lands had been burnt off in the fall encouraging better annual regeneration of spring grasses. This practice has been discontinued.

Before the Democratic Reform movement, Gatou had about 150 goats and about 50 sheep and they were considered very cheap. Average families had only three or four goats each and with an average of 2 mu of paddy per person, grain production was the mainstay of their economy. After the reform, numbers of livestock plunged during the famine of the early sixties. They began to recover their numbers between the famine and the cultural revolution, but the chaos of the cultural revolution again disrupted production. The mid to late 70s were again better. After 1963 and throughout the collective period, individuals were allowed to privately own livestock, but grain was still controlled by the production team. Only about a third of the families had the labor and the grain to afford to keep goats. Of these families, only a few people did the daytime work of herding for which they were traded shares of grain from those who did not go out with their herd. After the system of "individual responsibility" was implemented in the early 80's the door was thrown open for more families to acquire herds. And after the flood of 1985 it became an urgent need. Before the project began in 1991 there were 195 goats in Gatou; now there are 540. WuNguYuZe, a farmer in Gatou, said that "well before HPI came we wanted to develop goats but did not have the economic power to do so. Even without the river disaster, we still would have wanted to develop goats, but as a result of that flood the need became imperative."

Other subtle environmental changes may also be affecting goat husbandry. In the past, when goats suffered from diarrhea local farmers knew to feed Huang Nian (Chinese Goldthread, Rhizoma Coptidis), a famous medicinal herb that grew wild near the village. In the 1980s the price of this herb went very high and the hillsides in the area were cleaned out of this medicine. Since that time it can no longer be found in the wild here. Mr. Shao Ping of the Xide Bureau of Animal Husbandry noted that this may be a direct contributing factor in rising in goat mortality in the region seen in recent years.

By seeing the Xide farmers in their historical continuum, we can take the long view and see that while there has been an increase in total area that can be categorized as "natural pasture," there has also been critical changes in respect of its quality as well as an uneven development of the total number of animals. This view helps us put the current needs and plans of farmers in perspective, and gives us ideas of the way to help them move forward. Due to historical factors we cans see that the potential and the need to increase animal numbers exists, but again due to historical factors, attention has to be focused on winter fodder and pasture management. There is no traditional answer to the modern set of challenges.

AN HPI PROJECT

Into this setting of changing environment and expectations, a project sponsored by Heifer Project International is helping farmers adapt to the changes and meet rising expectations.

Farmers are given money allowing them to buy ten goats each. After three years they will return fourteen goats to the project in order to "pass on the gift" to other farmers. But the project is not limited to that and offers farmers a technical and support package which aims to help them adapt to changes by addressing the areas of feed and pasture development, breed development, and veterinary services among others.

The increased goats have given farmers an extra measure of financial security and boosted their ability to turn their labors into cash. Farmers cited significant increases in grain production from the increased manure already available for their crops as a result of the project, while at the same time they have been able to spend less money on fertilizer. One farmer estimated that their rice and corn yields have increased by around 300 pounds per mu, while at the same time they have cut almost in half the amount of urea applied. Urea is a big item on the expense account of Yi farmers of the 1980s and 1990s.

FEED DEVELOPMENT AND PASTURE MANAGEMENT

The HPI project has from the outset promoted farmers to plant special winter fodder crops to see the herds through the grass bottleneck that occurs each winter. Although raising sheep and goats have a long tradition here, planting winter fodder crops is a relatively new practice and helps to ease the pressure on the natural grasslands. Project farmers interviewed in the goat project area planted nearly .1 mu of fodder for each adult goat they owned, while in the nearby sheep project they planted nearly half a mu for each adult sheep. The project purchased over 700 pounds of vetch seed for distribution, to help encourage farmers to experience the benefits of the new system. While farmers acknowledge that they traditionally never gave goats supplemental feed unless it were sick or newly freshened, they will continue with this new practice of cropping for goats. It is now necessary.

On another front, Xide project managers attended a Nitrogen Fixing Tree Association workshop sponsored by HPI and the Nitrogen Fixing Tree Association in August 1992 and are now considering possibilities for developing a tree-planting aspect to the project in order to increase available nutrients to project animals, and improve marginal scrub lands near the project villages. Such a plan could, at the same time, help offset a trends that makes fuel wood ever more difficult for villagers to obtain.

With increasing goat numbers and increasing numbers of individual families involved in herding, project technicians are now looking at the need and possibilities for better coordination in pasture use. Currently there is no plan for what families use which pasture, when, and such a development should increase utilization efficiency.

VETERINARY SERVICES

In addition to making available the array of modern veterinary medicines considered appropriate for local needs, project technicians are also considering how to help farmers get access to traditional medicines that were once locally available,

but are no longer. Although there is a long tradition of raising black goats in this village, during collective times, the management of the herds was practiced by only a relatively few specialized individuals. After the reforms of the early 80s many new families became directly involved in the practice. The project has taken a leading role in helping them to learn the basics of healthy herd management and to trade experiences.

As one villager with long experience in goat farming, Bao Jiu Mu Gan, commented "before there was more wild browse, but now we have learned how to manage our goats better--to give them supplements and to deworm them and the results are good."

BREED IMPROVEMENT

While it does not seem necessary to introduce a new goat breed to this area, as the current goats are healthy and well adapted, there is room for breed improvement. The Yi farmers have a good understanding of the basic principles of animal breeding and practice selection. They feel there has been some back sliding of the breed in past decades. Likely due to the difficulties of the past few decades, their goats have gotten smaller and they are now individually selecting for size. Project technicians are discussing ways in which to help the farmers by introducing some "new blood" into their herds to facilitate the breeding of larger animals.

PROJECT SUCCESS

The Xide project is a success for many reasons. The goals and targets of the program are reasonable and focused. The program is run by capable technicians who know about the science of animal husbandry and at the same time are familiar with local conditions. They have been directly involved in the project villages and the frequent communication between technicians at all levels has been useful.

Furthermore, project results have gone well beyond the basic goals originally set out due to the exceptional level of commitment shown by political leaders at all levels in Xide. County leaders in Xide see the project's success as a key to their own desire to further the process of the open door policy in their region and make good relations with the outside world. They have designated individuals at each level of government who with the endorsement of the highest leaders take responsibility for the coordinating actions that make sure each step has the full range of support necessary.

Just as importantly, because the project addresses a genuine economic need, and because leaders have taken time to explain what HPI is about to project participants, the project has engendered the farmers support and enthusiasm.

This project gives us insight into how even a seemingly traditional people raising a traditional kind of livestock are still best seen in the historical continuum in which they live. The availability of livestock feed resources have undergone great changes in the past fifty years. Changes in population and numbers of livestock, deforestation and soil erosion have all played a role in influencing the changing resource profile available to farmers. This project is helping farmers, in an integrated way, adapt to these changes and the current optimism among these people is palpable and infectious. One HPI recipient concluded that with all the changes for the good that he has seen, he wishes he were younger so that he could experience more such changes.

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[1]

The research for this report was done in July 1992 and July 1993, during two field visits by the authors. It is based on extensive interviews with project leaders, local political leaders, and the farmers themselves and special help from Director Hu Ju Qian.