In winter, the Guibei region of Guangxi, as the famous hometown of horseshoe in the country, Lipu City, is once again the season for harvesting horseshoes. Lipu horseshoe is a big thin skin, sweet and juicy and slagged, as early as the 1980s made into canned food exported abroad to earn foreign exchange. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were tens of thousands of workers in a canning factory in Lipu, and as a Lipu person after the 60s and 70s, the Lipu people who had not been to the canning factory to work were simply not realLy Lipu people.
In winter in northern Guizhou, the temperature sometimes drops to about zero degrees. When you wake up in the morning, you will see white frost in the fields, and the cold air will invade the bones. But the industrious peasants showed up in the fields and began to dig the horses' hooves. Today, in the 21st century, human beings have flown into space to plant vegetables and run to the moon to see Chang'e, but the harvest of horseshoes has not progressed for thousands of years, or artificially use the nine-tooth nail rake of the second master brother to turn the mud up and pick it up one by one.
Horseshoe as a specialty of Lipu, a national geographical indication of agricultural products, one of the main sources of income for farmers. Horseshoe planting begins in July and can be harvested at the end of the year, with a high yield per acre. If planted well, you can produce six thousand catties per mu, two or three yuan a catty, and there is more than ten thousand incomes per mu. It's hard work, but it's worth it. It's much more cost-effective than growing rice.
The efficiency of digging horseshoes is too poor, a hard laborer will work hard to do more than a hundred pounds a day, it can be said that the biggest cost of planting horseshoes is labor. If there is no price for the horseshoe, ask a farmer to dig the horse's hooves, and the money from selling the horseshoes is not enough for labor money.
Almost all of the rural young and strong laborers have gone to the big cities to work, and the rest are the elderly, women, and left-behind children.
The hooves were dug up, and in addition to bagging and shipping them to other places for sale, they also had to be manually peeled and sold to canneries and food processing plants. This is also hard work, and almost no one wants to do it. Although there are some horseshoe-cutting machines on the market, the technology is still immature and cannot completely replace labor.