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157 C H A P T E R 5 The Revolution in the Village, 1954–1988 On June 30, 1987, the village of Sơn-Dương organized a formal ceremony to receive the Third-class Labor Medal from the national government . The village was commended for a wide variety of achievements, ranging from agricultural production and a rapid decline in birth rate to measures of economy in the life-cycle rituals. Invited to the ceremony were not only the incumbent high-ranking cadres from surrounding villages , the district, and the province, but also retired high-ranking cadres from Sơn-Dương and the oldest villager from each of the four hamlets to represent the rest of the population. In a departure from local tradition during the colonial era, the four elderly villagers were chosen solely on the basis of age, regardless of gender and class background. The squealing of hogs was heard from early in the morning, when they were brought from all over the village for butchering and distribution to village households. Each villager, child or adult, was to receive 300 grams of pork as part of the celebration. The celebration marked the culmination of a long process of revolutionary transformation. Significant progress had been achieved despite the painful memories of a small number of villagers, occasional policy reversals , and the hardships of the American war. Agricultural productivity had increased dramatically from 430 kilograms of paddy per mẫu per crop (1.2 tonnes per hectare) in 1954 to an average of 1.4 tonnes per mẫu (3.9 tonnes per hectare) for most of the 1985–1988 period.1 Experiments with a new variety of rice promised to increase the yield to 2 tonnes per mẫu (5.55 tonnes per hectare per crop). Equally significant was the considerably more intense use of land, thanks to the completion of the Lâm-Thao-Hạc-Trì water-control project and the construction of feeder canals starting in 1957. Before the canals were constructed , village fields had yielded only one staple crop annually. By 1988 158 The Revolution in the Village most of the land yielded three crops. The crop-rotation index, which indicates the average number of staple crops on agricultural land, had accordingly increased to 2.6. Since 1985 the village had added the important cash crop of peanuts to the annual cycle. Grown mainly for foreign markets, the peanut crop provided villagers with sizable cash incomes. The peanut acreage correspondingly grew from 50 mẫu in 1985 to 151 mẫu in 1988. Depending on altitude, four main crop rotation patterns existed on the 744 mẫu of village fields managed by the agricultural cooperative in 1988 (see Figure 2). In fields at the highest altitude, two rice crops were grown between the first and the eighth lunar months, followed by a corn crop for the remainder of the year (crop rotation pattern 1). In other high fields (199 mẫu), rice was cultivated from the beginning of the fifth month to the end of the eighth month of the lunar calendar (lúa mùa), corn and vegetables from the beginning of the ninth month to the end of the year, and peanuts from the beginning of the first month to the beginning of the fifth month (crop rotation pattern 2). To the extent that crop cycles might overlap, as in the case of the corn and rice crops in the fall of each year, the seeds of the second crop were sowed for germination on a layer of soil in the yard until the completion of the harvest of the other crop. In low-lying fields, rice was cultivated twice a year: from the beginning of the eleventh month to the middle of the fourth month for the winter-spring crop (lúa chiêm) and from the beginning of the fourth month to the middle of the ninth month for the summer-fall crop (lúa mùa) plus whatever villagers could grow within a month and a half on the land (crop rotation pattern 3). The first and third crop patterns were used on 311 mẫu of village fields. In the lowest fields (190 mẫu), rice was grown only once a year in the spring and summer (from the first to the sixth lunar month). For the rest of the year the flooded fields supplied villagers with fish as another food source (44 mẫu were reserved...

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