Caught Between Agricultural Science and Agriculture: Agriculture Students Growing Through Uncertainty
Foodthink Says
These rich and fascinating stories all come from the lived experiences that four agriculture students shared with us in Foodthink’s seventh “Eat Something Good” story collection.
For years, when people think of agriculture students, the image that flashes through their mind is simply them working the land. Starting last year, that stereotype began to break down, replaced by a wave of praise for the vitality these students radiate. And the students themselves have been generous in return — from rice and wheat to melons and pears — proudly showing off the graceful crops they have so painstakingly raised.
Yet some weighty questions have genuinely sat at the centre of their consciousness all along: Why did they choose agricultural science in the first place? Why is there such a disconnect between the agricultural science taught in universities and real-world farming? Where do agriculture students end up after graduation? What are the salaries like? Do companies actually need the technologies they are researching?
All four contributors have already graduated or are about to, so they have inevitably thought more about these questions. When describing the details of their studies and physical labour, they always come across with warmth and energy; but when the conversation turns to their job prospects, a tinge of hesitation and uncertainty creeps in. The contrast between the two is striking. It is hard not to wonder: will there ever be a social arrangement and industrial structure that allows the passion for nature and crops they cultivated at school to be poured into real land and agricultural development after they graduate?
That question goes beyond what any of them can answer. And as they themselves pointed out, scholars and research teams who carry a deep attachment to agriculture and rural life are still out on the front lines of research, doing their work even better. But the very life trajectories of these four agriculture students are, in their own right, part of the answer.
I. @Strawberry: A Northern Girl Who Went South to Grow Sugarcane
I am now a third-year master’s student in agricultural science. I studied landscape architecture for my undergraduate degree. Because it is difficult to get into postgraduate programmes with that specialisation, a lot of my classmates around me switched to agricultural science for their postgraduate entrance exams, and I followed the trend. I ended up with a supervisor who researches sugarcane, and so that is where I started learning to grow it. Before that, I had not even seen a single stalk of sugarcane.
The process of growing sugarcane has been one hurdle after another. So many things have caught me off guard and thrown me into fluster, and they have also taught me that while agricultural labour may look dull and monotonous, it is actually complex and ever-changing.
I still remember September, the very start of my first year of graduate school. Our group of three was called in to prop up the sugarcane. A typhoon that year had knocked the whole crop down. When I saw the scene, I was completely dazed, but there was no time to dwell on it — I just followed everyone else, shovelling soil to brace the roots. From that moment, with zero preparation, I officially set out on my path in agricultural science.
Because the university has limited farmland, the open-field plots belong to the senior labmates, and our sugarcane is grown in buckets. I remember that our group of three, together with the junior labmates, dug up three hundred buckets of soil in just two days. To improve the soil quality, the dug-out earth had to be spread on the ground to dry and then broken up. We hammered away at the hard lumps of earth and stones inside — solidly, for two full days.
Then there are situations you simply cannot imagine unless you have actually done the work. For example, when the ground is uneven, the sugarcane grows at an angle, following the tilt of the bucket. The tallest stalks can reach around two metres and are easily snapped by a typhoon. To protect our experimental specimens, we figured out a way to brace the stalks with bamboo poles.
The most troublesome part is that the sugarcane needs watering every single day. The patch of land where we grow it is a depression sixty to seventy centimetres below the surrounding flat ground. When the plants were still small it was manageable, but once the sugarcane grew tall with big, broad leaves, the whole plot became impenetrably dense — you could not see the sky above. On top of that, there are snakes and rats in the field, and every time I had to go down there, I was scared.
The weather in the south is hot. The students at my level in our lab group take turns watering once a day, each session lasting about half an hour. My sun-protective jacket, worn in two layers, soaks right through. During the holidays you simply cannot go out — if you do, you have to find someone to water for you, to look after your precious sugarcane. If you skip the watering, it will definitely affect the metrics you measure during sampling.
But this experience has also helped me grow in ways I did not expect, and I can now see how agricultural science research actually benefits farming. Take the microbial fertiliser we study, for example: it not only boosts crop yields but also makes the soil ecosystem more stable and reduces the damage chemical fertilisers cause to the soil.
On a personal level, studying agriculture has been hard, but the physical labour itself has given my life a sense of fullness and made me more resilient. I still remember the feeling of that first harvest: the sugarcane I had grown was so sweet — after all that time looking after them, it felt like the effort had finally paid off. After all, the land does not lie.
Now, with graduation just around the corner, there are not many job openings on the market that directly match my research. I am not sure whether I will continue in a role connected to agriculture, but these memories and this knowledge are precious.
In the end, I feel as though I stumbled into agricultural science by accident rather than out of genuine passion for the discipline. But over these past three years of tending and caring for crops, all those seemingly trivial, tedious little details have been engraved into my body and my senses. Whether there is thunder and rain outside, or the sky is clear and blue, I can always feel those natural shifts more keenly than most people — or at least more keenly than the person I used to be — because my sugarcane is still out in the field.
II. @Xiaoxiong: The Misunderstood Agriculture Student
When people hear “agriculture student,” they probably assume we are simply working the land. In reality, agricultural science has many branches, and the academic paths and daily routines of different agriculture students can look completely different.
My specialisation is called Crop Cultivation and Farming Systems, and my specific research direction is low-carbon agriculture and sustainable farming. In simple terms, it involves adjusting variables such as fertiliser rates and planting density to reduce the greenhouse gases produced during rice cultivation.
As an agriculture student who works on field trials, I go through a daily process of both mental and physical labour.
I have a one-mu experimental plot. During the summer holiday experiments, when it was just starting to dawn at five o’clock, we were already up and getting ready to head into the field. The reason for getting up so early was not the experiment itself — it was that Wuhan is genuinely a furnace of a city, and if you are still in the paddy field by nine in the morning, there is a very high chance of heatstroke.
I don’t know how many people have actually waded into a paddy field, but just keeping your footing is difficult — your rubber boots constantly sink into the mud, and not a single first-year student who goes into the paddy field for the first time fails to fall over. What makes it even more of a headache is that my one-mu plot is divided into twenty-four small plots, each with a different fertiliser concentration, and I need to go through all twenty-four. In the middle of all this physical labour, I am essentially soaked through with water and sweat, while at the same time I have to keep reminding myself not to mix up the data or the samples — otherwise all that sweat will have been wasted.
I remember the first time I took soil samples — it was one summer evening, and it took a full two hours. It was getting dark, but the heat was still oppressive. I looked up and around, and there was not a single person left. Staring at the university buildings several kilometres away, then looking down at the mud caking my body, I couldn’t help thinking: how on earth did my life end up here? But my face was plastered with sweat, and when I cried, I couldn’t even tell whether it was sweat or tears.
But over time, I gradually developed an affection for physical labour. Physical labour is pure. After each day in the field, I feel a strong sense of accomplishment and contentment, because the results of your work come back to you immediately — unlike the mental labour in an office or a laboratory, where the feedback is not quite so direct.
Sometimes, when running experiments in the field, if the weather is not so scorching that it makes you irritable, and the experiment is going smoothly, I slowly lose track of time and the whole of me enters a state of complete flow.
During the two months with the most experiments, I got up at five or six every morning and watched the sun rise little by little from the field. I felt as though I was just like the rice plants, absorbing the essence of heaven and earth. This is not purely a metaphor — it is a very intuitive feeling you get when you are close to nature.
I suppose this is why so many people online say agriculture students look full of vitality or life force. And in the process of working and conducting research in the fields together with the rest of our lab group, we have formed bonds that I know we will cherish for a long time — certainly memories we will keep returning to.
But beyond the physical labour, our ultimate goal is still to complete our research experiments. So an agriculture student not only has to do the work but also needs to have a clear sense of direction for their own experimental plot — a firm understanding in their mind of how to design the experiment, how to collect and analyse the data. All of this is the indispensable mental labour that comes with the job. So whenever my videos draw criticism from actual farmers, saying I do not grow things well or that my yields are low, I am at a bit of a loss. It is my experimental design that prevents me from applying fertiliser!
When you think about it, it is actually a quite awkward situation. Sometimes, while I am running my field trial, I simultaneously become aware that these techniques will not be of much use in our future careers, because we could never out-farm actual farmers, and the research is aimed at reducing carbon emissions, offering no help to yields at all. Even where some classmates’ research is designed to boost yields, it is unlikely that any agribusiness will adopt these technologies in the near term. The most common jobs we can find on the market are still sales positions — going out to sell agricultural inputs such as seeds, pesticides, and chemical fertilisers.
Given these real-world factors, as for what to do after graduation, I am firmly set on sitting the civil service exams. Of course, there are many in agricultural science — including my teachers and senior labmates — who carry a deep sense of purpose and a keen concern for the development of national agriculture, still working on the front lines of research. I have great admiration for them. I also hope that, in the future, more and more enterprises or institutions will emerge that give directions like mine a real place to make an impact.
III. @yoyo: “Why Study Farming After Going to University?”
When it comes to this, I am naturally proud, and I find the discipline incredibly fascinating: from a seed planted in the soil to a cup of clear tea in someone’s hands, the process is at once a work of nature and a work of human culture.
A bit of trivia: not every tea science student gets the chance to be involved in growing tea trees, because they are perennial woody plants. In the time it takes for a single tea tree to mature, an entire cohort of master’s and doctoral students will have already graduated. We tea science graduate students generally pick up the baton from our predecessors, continuing to tend and record each and every tea tree!
Field surveys are exhausting. What keeps us company is often the blazing sun, small insects, and the occasional snake. But whenever I think back to the labmates who went into the field with me — sweating together, encouraging each other, taking a happy photo after a long day’s work and then sharing an ice cream, falling deeply asleep in the car on a business trip — I feel that no matter how hard it was, these are memories I will never forget. And the effort is worth it. Only by overcoming these difficulties can we accurately record the data for each and every tea tree, ensuring that our subsequent analysis is trustworthy.
Through the four seasons, as time turns, the spring tea season is when tea farmers are busiest — and also when our team is at full tilt. Almost every teacher and student is bustling between the tea fields and the processing room. This is also when we are most purely ourselves as tea science students — picking and hand-firing tea with our own hands, surrounded by nothing but green, the whole room fragrant with tea. It was during that season that I learned to hand-fire Longjing.
These are the beautiful sides of being an agriculture student. But for a while, I did not want to tell people that I studied something in agricultural science — I always felt it was a notch lower in prestige, and the job prospects were not as good as in other fields. Relatives would question me: “You went to university, and now you’re studying how to work the land?”
Until recently, I came across a post praising agriculture students, and the comments were full of things like, “I don’t know — my cotton / wheat / chicks / ducklings… are so graceful.” I flipped through my phone, found a photo, and commented “My tea trees are also so graceful” in the Bilibili comment section. To my surprise, more than 2,800 people liked it.
Feeling the outside world’s affirmation and praise for agriculture students, I suddenly realised that seven years as an agriculture student had profoundly shaped me. Over those seven years, most of my life and work have been set in green spaces, so the moment I see plants and soil I feel a sense of closeness — I have even developed a keen sensitivity, able to unconsciously register the difference in my surroundings depending on whether there are plants present or not.
IV. @Chaobo: The Disconnect Between Agricultural Science and Agriculture
I studied at a university in the south, specialising in Agricultural Entomology and Pest Control. I graduated with my PhD last year and now work in a local agricultural and rural affairs department.
My main research subject is a rice pest — the brown planthopper. My daily research involves dissecting this tiny insect’s testes, ovaries, and the eggs it lays inside rice stems, all in the laboratory.
The brown planthopper is a poikilotherm, and its reproductive capacity is extremely sensitive to temperature. It has long been observed that climate warming drives brown planthopper reproduction and outbreaks. So what I am studying is the reproductive capacity of the brown planthopper at different temperatures, and identifying which key genes mediate the effects of temperature on its reproduction.
Relatives and friends often mistakenly think I am an agricultural expert! Some ask me: what disease have the plants at home come down with? What pests are there, and how do you treat them? What symptoms are showing up in the field, and what pesticide should you use? When I go back to my hometown, I also chat with a handful of elderly people who still farm the land, but most of them have no real concept of specific diseases or pests — they do not know exactly what is affecting their crops; all they know is to spray. In such cases, I cannot really offer any useful advice either.
In fact, there is a genuine disconnect between the agricultural science taught in universities and real-world agriculture. Modern agricultural science leans more towards biology; the agricultural knowledge taught at university is too heavily theoretical — the roles of various plant hormones, the distinction between different pest and disease symptoms, and so on — and after studying it all, students are left with nothing but a textual memory, lacking any intuitive, hands-on feel for it.
Many young researchers understand biology but not agriculture. By comparison, older teachers who work on field trials tend to spend a lot of time out in the fields and have at least some grasp of actual field conditions.
These days, doing field research tends to be a lot of work for little reward — more effort, longer timelines, fewer outputs. For example, some researchers have looked into what effect planting a particular flowering species on the field ridges has on the crops in the paddies; that kind of study generally takes several years before it has any scientific rigour. But if a single year brings extreme weather such as drought or heavy rain, all that work may be undone.
Molecular biology experiments, on the other hand, might yield a publication in just a few months — if today’s experiment fails, you simply start again tomorrow.
Of course, many frontier questions can only be explained at the molecular level, but good research should start with observing a phenomenon in the field and then work to dissect it at the molecular level. The trouble is that discovering a new phenomenon is difficult, and parsing it takes considerable time. To get results published quickly, to close out a project, or to graduate on schedule, most people simply choose to “switch to a different crop and keep following the same line of questioning and the same methodological path.”
That said, for me personally, this experience as an agriculture student has drawn my attention and thought more deeply to the “three rural issues.” Before, my awareness of food, the land, and rural life was the way I am aware of air and water — so constant that I could barely register its presence. Now, through studying organic agriculture, food safety, and related topics, and through continually encountering every facet of rural life and agriculture in my work since graduation, I have gradually come to appreciate the importance of food and its relationship to agriculture.
Produced by: Li Ye, Yuyang