The groundwater in China's rural areas riddled with holes can't be drunk.

Since 2005, as a doctoral supervisor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, I have led groups of graduate students to practice eco-agriculture in Jiangjiazhuang, Bianqiao Town, Pingyi County, Shandong Province, contracted about 40 mu of low-yield fields and set up an ecological farm. We have witnessed many changes in China's rural areas. The most impressive thing is that in the practice of ecological agriculture in the past 10 years, the pollution problem in China's rural areas has not changed, but has become more and more serious. Due to the widespread adoption of a production mode that violates the laws of nature, at the same time, a large number of urban garbage enters the rural areas, and the industries eliminated in developed areas fall to the ground in backward rural areas, therefore, there are many kinds of pollution in rural areas. The problem reflected in this article is the real situation we have found through investigation.

Investigation one: the suffocating stench

In July 2015, several provinces in Shandong experienced a series of high temperatures, with some cities reaching 40 degrees. In such hot weather, the stench from some chemical plants and farms is suffocating.

In the northwest corner of my ecological farm, an illegal farm appeared two years ago, which belongs to factory duck farming. The duck can be caged 25 days after it comes out of the eggshell. There is a large-scale duck slaughterhouse in the upper reaches. The slaughtered duck entered the southern city and was eaten by some unwitting consumers. In the economically developed places, in order to transfer pollution, factory farms and slaughterhouses have been transferred to the relatively backward Yimeng Mountain area. Ironically, it happens to be in the upper reaches of the water source, and the sewage and junk food produced here are back on their tables.

The stench comes from the duck droppings of the duck farm, usually the smell is very strong, and then to the high temperature, the odor concentration increases several times, the stench fumes the sky. Although the government stipulates that livestock and poultry droppings should be separated from dry and wet, and is not allowed to wash, these black-hearted duck farms still flush with water, which not only seriously pollutes the surrounding rivers, but also adds a large amount of fire alkali in the process of flushing. Such duck manure not only cannot fertilize the land, but also burns crops.

The reason why the duck can be out of the cage in 25 days, thanks to the extensive use of feed additives, a variety of heavy metals, antibiotics, hormones are added to the feed, allowing ducks to grow at an abnormal rate. Not to mention that such duck meat has serious quality and safety problems, even faeces have serious environmental pollution, and farmers who have worked in duck farms for a long time also have health risks.

Recently, Linyi City is fighting pollution with an iron fist, hoping to take advantage of the spring breeze to clean up the breeding farms in remote rural areas that seriously violate the laws of nature and seriously pollute the ecological environment, and return the green waters and green mountains that the people of Yimeng Mountain have not seen for many years as soon as possible.

Investigation number two: groundwater can't be drunk.

We investigated in the countryside and found that more and more farmers are buying water to drink. It was first found that farmers bought water around the Spring Festival in 2013, and this year villagers found that buying water has become a common phenomenon. At that time, more than a dozen villages along the banks of the Jinxian River in Yimeng Mountain went to the riverside beach to get water to drink, or each village had wells, drinking shallow groundwater. Today, the water in the river can no longer be drunk, the well water can't be drunk now, and even the tap water supplied by the town can hardly be drunk.

Families with conditions spend money on drilling deep wells, and drilling has become an industry.

The inability to drink river water is caused by the industries along the river, especially the slaughtering industry and factory aquaculture. The river water has been seriously polluted and has become five inferior types of water; the inability to drink shallow groundwater is a disaster caused by agricultural pollution, and farmers are trying to save trouble and reduce investment in the land. the use of a large number of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and other pesticides eventually led to the lack of drinking groundwater for a living. Farmers, who were originally free to drink water, have tasted the pain of spending money on water today-they have to buy water every day and every day.

Water is bought from the mountains, the upper reaches of the village is Mengshan, Mengshan due to good vegetation cover, less farmland, resulting in clean water and a trace of sweetness. However, when I went on an inspection a few years ago, I found that the water there was also faced with hidden dangers of pollution. Due to the increase in the number of tourists, there are all kinds of farm restaurants on the mountain, and the wastewater from the catering industry is discharged directly into the water source.

How many fertilizers and pesticides do farmers use in the environment? Generally, 300 to 400 jin of chemical fertilizers and 2 to 3 jin of pesticides per mu of land account for 10% to 30% of these chemicals, which can be used to use or protect crops, that is to say, a large number of chemicals are used to pollute, and the proportion of pollution is as high as 70% to 90%. A large number of chemical fertilizers, herbicides and other pesticides and plastic film caused soil pollution and a serious decline in land fertility, which led to the prosperity of pesticide and chemical fertilizer industry. The government subsidizes chemical fertilizers, pesticides, agricultural films and so on at the source, so that these chemicals are so cheap that even farmers are not distressed to use them-farmers remove an acre of weeds and the cost of herbicides is only 2.1 yuan!

The third survey: more and more pests are killed.

In July, farmers in several villages, such as Shiqiao, Nan Anjing, Bianqiao, Xijingbu, Huangpu Zhuang, and so on, began to be busy in Pingyi County. A kind of heart-drilling worm broke out in the farmland, which specializes in eating corncobs, that is, the young leaves at the top, and then drills under the plant, which is very difficult to control, and farmers hate it.

Farmers have to inject pesticides into the fields many times a year, and it is normal to use pesticides four or five times during sowing. If fruit trees are planted, the number of times of spraying is as high as 20 times a year.

Today's farmland is full of killing opportunities, pests are almost all baptized by pesticides, pesticides are used more and more, and pests seem to be getting stronger and stronger. In the human-insect war of the past 100 years, the winner of the chemical confrontation seems to be pests rather than humans-there are more and more cancer patients in hospitals, and the rate of pest reproduction is still increasing exponentially.

Pests will evolve under pesticide stress, and this evolution is induced by pesticides. It is said that some pests cannot be killed even if they are soaked in the original solution of the pesticide. These pests have evolved a layer of waxy hair that isolates the liquid. If someone studies the evolutionary mechanism of insect pests induced by pesticides, there should be good scientific discoveries. Farmers do not know how it works, and tons of pesticides continue to be dumped in their fields every year.

Some pests are man-made panic caused by agro-drug dealers and pesticide traffickers. In order to scare farmers, their purpose is to peddle their pesticides. They do not care whether farmers have cured the pests. What they care about is the sales of pesticides.

When there are pests in farmland, only 2-3 pests per mu, plant protection experts advise farmers to spray pesticides and recommend which pesticide to use. If you don't fight, what farmers often hear is the following:

Don't you get pesticides? If you don't hit, the crops will be ruined.

Some government officials have also become microphones for pesticide dealers: "without pesticides, output will be reduced by 70%, or even wiped out."

Nowadays, the names of pesticides are becoming more and more strange, such as "one step" and "No worms in January". They are not only full of hatred for insect pests, but also full of temptation for farmers-not afraid that you will not come and buy them.

Investigation 4: the river turns into a smelly ditch

To the east of Jiangjiazhuang Village, Bianqiao Town, Pingyi County, Shandong Province, there is a small river, called Jinxian River, which is the upper reaches of the Yi River. The Yihe River is a large river in the Siyishu River system of the Huaihe River Basin, which flows into the sea from Jiangsu. In the era when there was no running water, the villagers of more than a dozen villages along the river lived on this river, and they could drink both surface water and surface water, and there was no need for water treatment. Up to now, this river is also the water source of Linyi City and the cities along the route, but various water treatment measures are needed.

In the past, when there was no air conditioning in the village, the river was a natural summer resort. In the hot summer, people who have been busy all day use this river to remove the heat from their bodies, and men take a bath on the river; women take a bath in the river, but men have the right to wash both day and night, while women wash only at night.

The villagers have many memories of the river:

There are a lot of fish in the river. When there is a flood in summer, dozens of jin of big carp can be caught on the shoal. The fish run out of the reservoir upstream. When the current is gentle, you can also see some fish staying quietly under the shallow water. There is a kind of fish, we call it "Shali lie" (scientific name snakehead, snakehead fish), you can catch it with your hands, and there are more crabs, shrimp, frogs, Loaches and so on in deep water. Children can fish shrimp with hedgerows, and they can also weave fishing nets and weave them into the shape of a dustpan, which can be tied to long poles to catch more fish. The river flows further into the forest, and timid children dare not go into it. There is a kind of bird called Little Yellow Finch in the forest. Its feathers are golden, small and flexible, and it is difficult for children to hit it with a slingshot. In summer, countless cicadas resound throughout the forest, and the hotter the weather is, the more joyful it is. At this time, the happiest thing for the children is to stick the cicada after class, pick the skin, and catch the cow (that is, the golden cicada, the golden cicada is the larva of the cicada, and it becomes a cicada after shelling).

Today, the river has become so smelly that it cannot swim, let alone drink. There are no fish and shrimp in the water and no Reed marshes along the river. The river carries all kinds of pollutants downstream every day, passes through the cities along the route, and eventually flows to the sea.

According to the villagers, the deterioration of the river began with the deforestation of local forests, a process that took place around 1982, starting with the division of collective forests, the sale of diversified local forests, and then planting all kinds of poplars. Then people found an opportunity to get rich-selling sand. Due to the rapid development of the city, a large amount of sand is needed, the sand of the Golden Line River is cut off layer by layer, and the sand here is made into concrete, propping up cities one after another.

Later, people crazily built all kinds of farms along the river, mostly factory fast-growing farms, raising chickens and ducks, and the sewage was discharged directly into the Jinxian River; after there were more chickens and ducks, slaughterhouses were built along the river, and slaughterhouse wastewater entered the Jinxian River almost without treatment.

There are other large and small factories, as well as fragments of fertilizers, pesticides and plastic film discharged from farmland, which also enter the Golden Line River with surface runoff when it rains.

This once beautiful golden thread river existed in name as early as 20 years ago. Now it is very difficult to find sand in Shandong and even the whole inland provinces. Heavy metals and other substances in the sediment also need special treatment and recovery, which is expensive.