What is the full text of Compassionate Farmer?

Who knows how hard it is to eat on a plate?

Who knows what is on the plate, and what is in the grain is bitter.

Compassionate [mǐn] farmers: sympathize with and pity the farmers who live a hard life.

Wo: a collective term for cereal plants.

Dangwu: midday, noon.

meal [cān]: food, here referring to rice.

All: all.

Translation:

The farmers continued to hoe under the scorching sun at noon, and beads of sweat fell one by one onto the land.

Who knows that every grain of rice on this plate is full of the hard work of the farmers?

Compassionate Farming (2)

Spring planted a grain of corn, autumn harvest ten thousand seeds.

There are no idle fields in the four seas, and the farmers are still starving.

Su [sù]: a general term for cereals, here referring to the seeds of food crops.

Autumn Harvest: a "fall into".

Ten thousand seeds: Zi refers to grain particles. Ten thousand grains describes the harvest of a lot of grain.

The Four Seas: the whole country.

Idle fields: barren and abandoned land.

Jude: still.

Translation:

Sow a seed in the spring, and you will reap a lot of grain in the fall.

There is not a single barren and abandoned piece of land in the world, but there are still farmers who plant fields and die of hunger.

About the author:

Li Shen (772-846), known as Gong Chui, was a native of Wuxi (present-day Jiangsu). His poems paid attention to the social ills of the time and cared about the plight of the people, among which "Compassionate Farming" is the most widely known. It is also influential in the history of literature, and has been selected as a teaching material for elementary school textbooks in modern times.