Flashback- Kaifeng

We spent a couple of days in central China at Kaifeng.Our first destination was a seed dressing manufaturer.  They import globally and have a tie up with one of our Nuffield team.  The scale of the operation was imprseeive with mass production of various items of seed dressing plant.  I can easily see how our manufacturing struggles against this scale of operation.  Once again, the use of labour instead of capital provided the competitive edge over  western based business.  The cost of wages are sneaking up within China so it will be interesting to see how long thi competitive edge can be maintained.

.We stopped off at a wheat cropping farm and had a look at the harvest in progress.  China prduces 90M tonnnes of wheat each year with most of it grown on small scall farms around 2 - 3 Mou (pronounced 'moo' and there are 15 Mou per hetare).  Every person in China has a small land holding and in the case of grain production get the harvest in by use of the local contractor who gathers the harvest by  small combine harvester.  The person then dries the grain on the side of the road (or in the middle of the road in some cases) .  It is amazing that 90M tonnes of grain are produced in this ay but it works somehow.  To give you a sense of scale, Australia produces around 25M tonnes of grain per year.