Leaving the City, I Planted a New Seed for Life on the Farm
A Note from Foodthink
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I. A Wandering Life Before the Farm
At the time, PDT was mainly working on the consumption end, organising consumer education in cities, partnering with restaurants on projects, and so on. But I always felt that, starting from daily life, food production was more marginal and more invisible than consumption — and far more compelling to me.
Because I wanted to try being a worker, I left PDT and set off on a period of wandering. During this time, two farmers made a deep impression on me.
The first was my godmother in a Dong village.
At the time I was working for accommodation at a hostel in Kangding, doing reception, working in the kitchen, and housekeeping. On my way back, I stopped in Guandong Village in Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County, Guangxi, where I had previously collected oral histories, but this time I was there as a member of the family and a participant in farming. I happened to arrive during the autumn harvest, so I joined them in harvesting rice, picking tea, and making Dong brocade.
The second was my maternal grandmother.
During that period, I tried making a documentary with my maternal grandmother as the main subject. Because she also grew up in the countryside, I wanted to know how she saw rural life, farmers, and the city.
Once, we walked out to a field of rapeseed on the edge of town. The beautiful blossoms made me so happy. Seeing my expression, my grandmother said, “Do you know? All those rapeseed pods, if you press every last one into oil, they’d only fetch just over ten thousand yuan — far less than what you’d earn going out to work.” After you subtract the costs of land and labour, farmers aren’t really making any money at all. What people in the city see as a beautiful sea of flowers, farmers see as hard work.
These two moments planted a seed of doubt and shame in me.
After that, I signed up for Foodthink’s “Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme.” On the one hand, I wanted to find out what farming was really like: What does it actually mean to farm? What is the reality for farmers today? Can agriculture offer a way of life?
On the other hand, it was a way of escaping my parents’ “pursuit.” Even though I had always wanted to break free from the mainstream vision of life, my parents still felt I had been “not pursuing a proper career” for the past few years. By then I had started applying for master’s programmes abroad, but I wasn’t quite sure why I wanted to go study overseas. It felt as if, if I kept following this path, I would end up back inside the mainstream framework after all.
So, going to the farm as an intern was my last attempt.
II. What the Farm Is Like
The farmer who runs Guixinyuan, Brother Qiang, and several other co-founders are all “half-farmer, half-X” people. Qiang works during the week at a multinational company in Shenzhen; he only goes to the farm on weekends and holidays.
The first keyword for Guixinyuan is “permaculture”.
The farm’s design drew on permaculture principles: Zone 0 is where people live; Zones 1, 2, and 3 are our agricultural production areas, getting progressively closer to nature as you move outward. Zones 4 and 5 are left for plants and animals to grow freely, so we don’t go in there very often.
At the same time, the farm regularly hosts visitors for tours, overnight stays, and meals, and collaborates with schools in Shenzhen on nature education programmes, among other things. Because the income streams are quite diverse, Guixinyuan reached financial balance after just three years of operation. An ecological farm needs to diversify its operations as much as possible — that is one of the lessons I learned here.
III. Daily Life on the Farm
After that, I ask the two masters to assign me the day’s tasks. Because Brother Qiang, the farm’s owner, is usually not at the farm, it is mainly they who manage things, and we interns are there to help them out.
The tasks we do most often are weeding and mulching.
In these two photos, the one on the left shows the sweet potato patch before weeding. You can see that where there is grass, the soil colour is darker, which means it holds more moisture. Once the grass is pulled out, the wet soil comes up with the roots and stems, bringing all the moisture to the surface. After the sun hits it, the soil dries out and becomes as hard and compacted as the areas that never had grass.
Because I noticed that grass can protect the soil, I was left with a big question in my mind about whether weeding is really necessary.
I later found out that the reason this patch needed weeding was that the sweet potato leaves had not yet grown large enough, and the weeds would compete with them. The weeds had to be pulled while they were still small and few. Once the sweet potato leaves grew big, the weeds could be left alone.
But to keep the soil from being bare, grass is used as mulch. This suppresses weeds, retains moisture, and the decomposing plant matter forms humus, enriching the soil.
Actually, Master A-Jiang and his team know a great deal about mulching techniques.
For example, when weeding the sugarcane field, he told us to lay the pulled weeds around each sugarcane plant, forming a ring. If you are worried the weeds will re-root once laid on the ground, you can stack the roots of one plant on top of the leaves of the one before it — as long as the roots do not touch the soil, the weeds will not grow back.
Both masters’ growing methods are practical, experience-based approaches, quite different from what I had imagined of traditional farming or natural farming.
Later on, I developed a hobby of studying weeds at the farm. It turns out many weeds are edible, and some even have medicinal value. Sometimes the dog follows us out to the fields, and I noticed he would eat different types of grass. Master A-Jiang told me, “Dogs are much cleverer than people. When a person gets sick, they still have to go to the hospital, but a dog just goes to the field, nibbles a few blades of grass, and cures itself.”
● A few common weeds we come across, in order: Phyllanthus; Bermuda grass (Cynodon dactylon), which has stolons and spreads across the whole patch like a carpet in no time, making it very difficult to pull out; spiky needle grass (Bidens), which is also edible — if you get a mosquito bite, you can pick a bit, crush it, and apply it to the bite to ease the itch; wild chrysanthemum, which grows abundantly along waterways, but Brother Qiang says it is toxic, so none of us dare to eat it; chickweed (Stellaria media); false stinking grass, which has a distinctive, almost luxurious aroma reminiscent of Italian herbs — reportedly not edible for people either, but geese and fish absolutely love it.
My companion, fellow intern Chenghao, is really into studying insects. She often calls me over to show off some new bug she has found, but I am not that interested — we each have our own area of focus.
Besides all that, we also do fruit bagging, composting, sowing, and so on.
IV. What a Farming Novice Learned
Master A-Jiang often says, “Plants are really just like people. Picture a plant’s root system — it looks like the blood vessels in the human body. Think about what a person needs, and you will know what a plant needs.” When it comes to the details of watering, top-dressing, and other operations, he sometimes struggles to give us a scientific explanation, but he tends to them with exactly that mindset — almost by instinct.
Weeds are actually part of this natural system, too. For example, when I was looking after the peanut patch, I noticed lots of small black bugs sitting on the weeds — those were stink bugs. They seem to prefer the weeds, and as long as the weeds are there, they do not bother the peanuts. So I started leaving a patch of weeds for them. I think the way you treat weeds really reflects your whole approach to growing things.
V. Hopping from Farm to Farm: From One Tree to a Whole Forest
In the end, I found: there is no single right answer in ecological agriculture — it is a spectrum.
A farm can be measured by many indicators: its scale, the degree to which it is “ecological” — does it use polytunnels? How much fertiliser? How revenue is split across the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors, and so on. Every farm is actually different, but I feel that as long as people share some basic principles — respecting nature, not causing harm to health or the environment — they are all practising ecological agriculture.
When I was chatting with Brother Liu at Xiaoliushu Farm, he divided farms into three types: interest-driven, skill-based, and technology-focused. You can look at the farms I visited through these lenses:
Interest-driven — whose interest is it satisfying? It can be the farmer’s own interest, like Sister Chen Yanhong’s own vegetable patch; or it can be urban residents’ interest, like Phoenix Commune and Xiaomaolv, which divide the land into small plots and rent them to city dwellers.
Skill-based. Teacher Pengcheng stood right in the field explaining to us how to prune lychee and guava trees — a simple pruning session can determine the tree’s final shape and where the fruit will hang. Skills are not limited to growing things, either: for example, Lüwo Farm can process delicious biscuits, and Teacher Gan Juzheng makes rice cakes and rice noodles from her own rice.
Technology-focused. Yinlin Farm’s management is particularly outstanding — the composting layout, the crop rotation in the polytunnels, everything is meticulously organised, and it manages to bring young people together to work. In Beijing, too, there are standout technical achievements like Xiaoliushu’s farm machinery and Xiqing’s soil and cultivation techniques.
Agriculture can be not just a way of life, but also a “way of thinking.”
When I was touring farms in Guangxi, I also felt that my ecological farming friends have a worldview quite different from urban residents — closer to the traditional Chinese ideal of the unity of heaven and humanity, with a way of thinking distinct from modern society. They are also drawn to topics like traditional Chinese medicine, traditional culture, and celestial observation. Along the way I met all kinds of people with different perspectives — the sort you would rarely encounter in the city.
VI. The Future
As things stand, I probably do not yet have any of the three. I have already learned so much and seen a very big world, but perhaps I still want to see an even bigger one. I still have questions about this world, and perhaps the process of exploring those questions is itself the process of finding my “X.”
It is fair to say this journey has already planted a seed in my heart. Whether it is studying, working, saving up, or meeting new people, I hope to move a little closer to this ideal, step by step. It will also become a new window through which I look at the world, witnessing more and more farms. I hope these notes will keep being written, on and on.
