If you spend time in the Chinese countryside you’ll eventually run into factories filled with entire farming villages now displaced by industrial development. I’m not one to romanticize an agrarian lifestyle that I wouldn’t to live, myself, but I’d be dishonest if I didn’t admit that I find the disconnect from the land – and the skills to maintain it – occasionally disheartening. Thus, I present the photo below. It was taken a few weeks ago in northern China, in an area where plastics recycling has completely supplanted an agricultural economy and lifestyle that must have lasted for millennia. And yet, at least at the odd little factory where I took the photo below, it seems that certain instincts and skills haven’t quite disappeared. So, despite the fact that it looks as if the farmer in the photo is plowing dirt, he’s actually “plowing” wet shredded wire insulation to help it dry more quickly (for eventual reprocessing). Click for an enlargement.

After the jump, a closer look at the ‘crop’ …