When Big Old Chen rode on the fender and brought Li Long to the cotton fields, they could hear Wang Mingjun scolding a worker from a distance:
"What the hell have you been doing? A third of these several dozen mu of cotton is infested with red spider mites, and you're only reporting it now? Why didn't you wait until they'd eaten all the leaves before telling me?"
Li Long and the others parked the tractor at the head of the field and walked to the edge without going in, watching from a distance.
The scientific name for red spiders was leaf mites, but locals had called them red spiders for decades. They were pests almost impossible to see with the naked eye, living on the undersides of cotton leaves and sucking their sap.
These things could crawl onto other cotton leaves, or onto people, spreading elsewhere as people walked through the fields.
Even worse, they could ride the wind to other places!
So, generally, once the cotton reached half a meter tall and its leaves had grown dense, farmers wouldn't wander through other people's fields, mainly for fear of spreading pests.
But at first, nobody paid much attention. They often walked into other people's fields to chat or ask about things.
They only learned better later, when Agricultural Technology Extension Workers came to the countryside to share information and explain the situation.
The cotton in the field was now sixty or seventy centimeters tall and flourishing. Li Long saw that its growing tips had already been pinched off and it was branching out to the sides. The flowers had opened, and some of the early ones were even starting to set bolls.
With people arriving, Wang Mingjun couldn't very well keep scolding.
Actually, he could have left it alone