Apples, Matsutake and Yak: How Do They Benefit the Environment, Farmers and Consumers Alike? | Food Talk Vol. 48

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This episode features social enterprise “Muyunpo” as guests on “Food Talk” to hear how they work alongside villagers to explore fairer, more sustainable ways of producing — protecting nature while getting the village’s finest produce to markets far afield, so that farmers earn more.

Xiaojin County in Aba Prefecture, Sichuan, sits in the Jiarong Tibetan region. Even driving from Chengdu takes five or six hours. The great range in altitude and varied terrain endow this area with abundant, high-quality agricultural products. Over a decade ago, the non-profit “Chengdu Shuguang Community Development Capacity Building Centre” came here and, like many organisations, after years of running poverty alleviation and development projects, “Shuguang” embarked on a path of helping mountain farmers sell their produce. But in the end, they found a rather different route.

To run the agricultural produce sales, “Muyunpo” was established in 2017. As a social enterprise, it was not created to make a profit but to serve the community’s interests. By organising villagers to forage, grow and graze together, the village has come alive, and the surplus from sales is returned to the villagers’ groups at year-end, so that public funds flow back into the community. Unlike the traditional “farmer–trader” relationship, where each side looks out for its own bottom line and farmers are at the mercy of the market, Muyunpo values trust and cooperation. The villagers’ groups make their own decisions and set their own standards, while the social enterprise provides support from behind the scenes.

The result of years of effort is a range of higher-quality, healthier and more environmentally sustainable products: sustainably foraged matsutake and morels, organically grown apples and sweet cherries, Sichuan pepper and Sichuan pepper oil, heirloom grain varieties, free-range yak meat… In this episode, Yunhui and Xixi from Muyunpo will share with us the vivid stories behind each of these products.

In this episode, we will talk about:

  • How hard is it to earn more from matsutake and morels by cutting out the middlemen?
  • How does a group of mothers from the Tibetan region manage to forage while protecting the wild?
  • What do villagers need to do to keep yak in the traditional free-range grazing way?
  • How can a community build trust in the producer–buyer relationship and maintain production standards?
  • When the sales surplus flows back to the community, how do villagers put it to use?

This Episode’s Guests

This Episode’s Host

Timestamps

00:52 What is a social enterprise? The founding and mission of “Muyunpo”: a non-profit enters the village, finds that farmers grow well but cannot make money — how do they break through?

07:00 Matsutake has so many grades, and it is actually a trade secret? How did Muyunpo workers go from “newbies” to market insiders?

15:51 Delicious morels can get stripped clean, too. How do you overcome the “tragedy of the commons” and persuade villagers not to exhaust the resource?

28:37 Sustainable morel foraging — why has it given the village mothers more of a voice?

31:58 Free-range grazing vs. pen-feeding for fattening: changes in yak husbandry are eroding traditions in Xiaojin’s Tibetan area

38:39 Sichuan pepper, apples, mixed grains… Other agricultural products that Muyunpo trades in

41:08 In an age of distrust, why are ordinary people willing to follow Muyunpo in changing how they grow their crops?

42:46 How precious are heirloom apples? Villagers pick from their own orchards for children far away from home

48:18 If you would like to support sustainable agriculture, what can you do?

Women from the morel foraging group.
The sustainable foraging group sorting and weighing the day’s matsutake harvest.
What is sustainable foraging? The morel foraging group’s agreement is: do not pick morels under 3 cm in length, do not take the soil around the morel roots, and bring back any waste generated during foraging.
The soil-covered base of a morel is of very low quality and is generally not eaten. But when villagers sell to middlemen, they often cut the base as well in order to get a few extra yuan, and this has become an unspoken industry practice. The consequence is that the morel can no longer continue to grow.
The morel foraging cooperative used the retained public funds to give a box of milk to each villager aged 65 and over.
Muyunpo’s fruit-growing group organising a pruning training session.
Villager Brother Yang giving yaks supplementary feeding in winter. Time constraints mean this episode cannot cover everything about yaks. If you are interested, you can search for more on Muyunpo’s WeChat public account.
Xixi and Yunhui at the 2024 Guangzhou Fengnianqing festival — their products were in high demand at the market.

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All images provided by Muyunpo

Music: Ba Nong

Production: Xiaojing

Editor: Wang Hao

Contact email: [email protected]

Published by Foodthink