“In Jinxiang you have to kneel, you have to crawl, or you won’t get any money at all.” So goes a folk song that laments the lives of the nearly 10,000 seasonal laborers who every May descend on Jinxiang, a county in eastern China’s Shandong province, to pick garlic.

Garlic-picking cannot easily be done mechanically, so every harvest season local garlic farmers hire temporary farmhands to work on the more than 100,000 acres of land laden with freshly grown garlic. Jinxiang leads the country in the production of garlic, a widely used ingredient in Chinese cuisine.

The price of garlic reached a record high in late March, and this brought riches to Jinxiang County and its farmers, but without translating into higher wages for the laborers, who are still paid between 100 and 150 yuan ($15 and $22) per day. Most of the workers are over 50 years old — younger people don’t think the low pay is worth the trouble.

Luo Guangfu is 65. He has no children and no farmland of his own, and he is used to subsisting on a monthly allowance of 160 yuan. Due to his advanced age, his daily production is on the low end, and, consequently, so is his salary. But he can still make more in a month farming than he might make the entire rest of the year back in his hometown.

Cao Faliang, also 65, needs money to cover his wife’s diabetes treatment. Cao used to work as a construction worker, but it’s hard for a man his age to find construction work. Instead, he works 14-hour days in Jinxiang. “I’m not young anymore, but I’m still able to work,” he said. “I should see what I can do to relieve my children’s stress.”

A Chinese version of this article first appeared in Sixth Tone’s sister publication, The Paper.

(Header image: Two women carry sacks of garlic on a farm in Jinxiang, Shandong province, May 19, 2016. Quan Yi/Sixth Tone)