By late summer, the rice fields of southern China have turned to gold. The time has come to bring in the harvest. Nowadays, modern high-yield strains are grown throughout much of the rice lands, boosted by chemical fertilizers and reaped by combine harvesters. This is the "Great Rice Bowl" of China, producing a quarter of the world's rice.

 

 

Insects stirred up by the noisy machines are snapped up by gangs of red-rumped swallows, including this year's youngsters who were unfledged several weeks ago. This could be their last good feast before they head south for the winter.

 

 

Mechanized farming works best in the flat-bottom valleys of the lowlands. To the south, in the terraced hills of Zhejiang Province, an older and simpler lifestyle persists. It's 7 in the morning, and Longshan's most successful businessman is off to work. In the golden terraces surrounding the village, the ears of rice are plump and ripe for harvesting. But today, rice isn't uppermost in Mr. Yang's mind. He has  bigger fish to fry. Further up the valley, the harvest has already begun. Yang's fields are ripe too, but they haven't been drained yet. That's because for him, rice is not the main crop.

 

 

The baskets he's carried up the hillside give a clue to Yang's business. But before he starts work, he needs to let some water out of the system. As  water level drops, the mystery is revealed: golden carp. Longshan villagers discovered the benefits of transferring wild-caught carp into their paddy fields long ago. The tradition has been going on here for at least 700 years. As the water level in the paddy drops, bamboo gates stop the fish escaping. The beauty of this farming method is that it delivers two crops from the same field at the same time: fish and rice.