Fourteen Years Since Coming Home, Finally Started Farming

I. Nearly Left

After many years back in the village, there was a period when I seriously considered leaving for good. A few years ago, the large-scale farmers had started taking over all the fields in the village. In our little Jiangnan village known as the “Chrysanthemum Hometown,” we were the only family still growing chrysanthemums and rice. A few more households still raised silkworms, but beyond us, only a scattered handful remained.

My father asked, uncertainly, whether we should lease out our fields too.

He was probably a little embarrassed about being in the way of the large-scale farmers.

◉ Click the image to read about the author’s story of growing the last acre of Hangzhou white chrysanthemum in the village.

Since leaving Beijing to return home in 2011, we have stayed in our own village the whole time. Along the way, things have shifted a few times.

At the beginning, the motivation was very simple: just go back to our own village and run a small ecological farm. In my mind’s eye, the farm was right around our own home, lush and full of life. I already knew that ecological farming was hard to make money from (but supposedly it could keep a family fed), yet being able to live in such an environment was compensation enough (this is also why I admire Tang Liang). Then again, a 25-year-old second-generation farmer with virtually no agricultural experience, no social experience, and not a penny to his name – a complete wipeout was only to be expected. In our own village, I couldn’t even rent a plot of land.

◉ Tang Liang (back row, far left), a young returnee from Jintang, Sichuan, has put down roots in the land with his whole family – inspiring envy among many of his peers who had returned home only to hit setbacks, and opening up a wider vision of what life could be for more young people. Click the image to learn about Tang Liang’s story. Photography: Tang Wei

After my farm dream fell apart, I first went to Huzhou, not far from home, where Old Shen was growing ecological rice. It was early spring when I arrived, and the fields were bare and empty. The original workers had left; only an elderly man in his eighties remained to look after things. Old Shen’s money was nearly gone, and he was hunting for workers and funding at the same time. A villager kept coming to argue with him, demanding a higher rent on the land. Early spring in Jiangnan is truly damp and cold, and even more so in the hills. Before long, all ten of my fingers were covered in frostbite sores. At night I had to soak my feet for a long time before I dared get into bed. In the middle of the night, Old Shen’s newborn son would often cry. Old Shen’s farm, too, was on the verge of collapse. A few months later, I left.

II. Finding a Village

When I picked up the dream of returning home again, a whole year had already passed. This time, it was not about starting a farm, but about returning to the silkworm-and-mulberry tradition of Jiangnan and working with my family on the craft of making silk quilts. So for many years, while most young returnees were farming, we were actually making quilts. After a few years of silk quilts, we also revived an acre of ecological Hangzhou white chrysanthemum cultivation and traditional processing in the village.

Along the way, as a “veteran” young returnee, I had seen too many cases of failed ecological farm ventures. Besides, we never really saw returning home as a startup, nor did we want to go big, so we never rented any land – just using our own little patch of a mu or so (literally).

When people introduced “Mei and Fish Farm,” the area was so small I felt a bit embarrassed, and it was somewhat of a misnomer. The year before last, we simply changed the company suffix from “Family Farm” to “Silkworm and Mulberry Culture”.

◉ In this 2023 podcast episode, Yu Jiangang also gives a detailed retrospective of his experience returning home to make silk quilts and grow Hangzhou white chrysanthemum. Click to listen to the podcast.

We really started looking at other villages. We focused on the north-west of the county town, because that would be closer to home and more convenient for dropping off and collecting the kids from school. My thinking was: leave our own village, but stay within the silkworm-and-mulberry region. Find a village with the same culture, so we could carry on with what we were doing.

Honestly, all these years in our own village, being around parents and relatives – it is the constant drain of a closed, small-world community, truly exhausting. Better to create some physical distance. Out of sight, out of mind.

Our calligraphy teacher recommended a village near Wuzhen, saying there was a house for rent with a large mulberry grove right next to it – perfect for us. We were a step too late; by the time we went, someone had already rented it as a warehouse.

There was another village that had long been earmarked for “city folk” to start businesses. Most of the original villagers had already been relocated. The company running the village had been operating for a few years but was in a half-stagnant state.

We also visited a village where a friend runs a teahouse. The villagers were mostly absent-minded, waiting for the major road to the west to be widened so they could finally collect their long-awaited, sizeable demolition compensation.

My wife, Yuhui, found a house online, a bit off the main road. There was a grove of trees in front of it. Looking more closely, the trees were a row of withered, listless mulberry trees. It turned out the landlord had planted nursery saplings after she stopped raising silkworms. She said if we wanted to raise silkworms, she would let us use all her silkworm rearing trays. But at the time, some construction workers were still renting a room inside, so we would have to wait until the end of the year.

At the thought of having to clean, renovate, and organise a three-storey house (and the mulberry grove), the enormous drain on energy was too much, and Yuhui ended up politely declining the landlord’s offer.

After that, from time to time, we went back to the “City Folk Entrepreneurship Village” a few more times, just to see if any suitable house had come up.

A struggling guesthouse was up for transfer. Yuhui got in touch to go and look. I said, are you serious about opening a guesthouse? She said no – a guesthouse does not need any renovation fuss; we could just use it as a workspace for making silk quilts.

I asked the management company whether they still had any land. They had a plot – 3,000 yuan per mu per year. Why so expensive? That plot is zoned for amusement facilities and experiences. I am not doing amusement rides, just ordinary farming. Then there was nothing – all the regular farmland had been leased by the company to grow tobacco.

I do not remember if that was the last time we looked at another village. Anyway, the urge to leave just kept growing.

◉ In a long essay about his and his wife Mei Yuhui’s experience of returning home to start a business, Yu Jiangang also described the various models of rural development around him. Click the image to find out more.

III. A Familiar Stranger

Until autumn 2024, when this season’s Osmanthus-season silkworms in the village suddenly contracted poisoning. Every villager said it was directly linked to the large-scale farmers spraying pesticides by drone on the rice fields they had leased. I simply couldn’t bear to see the last few households still raising silkworms just stop like that – this is a village tradition that has gone on for hundreds of years! We negotiated with the large-scale farmers and the village chief for several rounds, and in the end decided to take over 14 mu of rice fields on the edge of the mulberry orchard for ecological cultivation.

The problem, though, is that I didn’t have much experience growing rice, let alone doing it ecologically.

Rice truly is a familiar stranger.

I remember being in Year 3 of primary school when my mother dragged me out to the field to transplant rice seedlings and, “fiercely” dropped a line: “You’re a farmer – you can’t even farm! Who’s going to look after you when the time comes?” But my mother herself never imagined that it wouldn’t be farming that kept our whole family fed later on – it was the two of them, husband and wife, going to work in a factory. On top of that, with one stage of schooling after another, I simply never got the chance to properly master rice transplanting.

◉ Mother did not approve, but she always supported my dream of returning home through her own labour. Click the image to read the author’s essay about his mother.

The last time I farmed before leaving the village was the summer after the college entrance exam. Transplanting rice in the fading light, my class teacher was ringing me in all sorts of ways to ask about my results.

After that transplanting, I first went to university in Jilin, then to Beijing for work, and never set foot in a field again. After resigning in 2011, I did rural public-interest work in Longzhou, Guangxi, where I did work on a rice-paddy duck-farming project with the villagers: going into the fields to observe golden apple snails, handing out ducklings, occasionally checking whether anyone was secretly using chemicals. Other than all that, I really was in the paddy.

◉ During the time in Longzhou, Guangxi, herding cattle with the village’s old Party secretary. Click the image to learn about the author’s story of returning to Longzhou more than a decade later.

The few months I spent at Old Shen’s ecological farm happened to be the winter fallow – the rice fields were bare, not a thing in them, and I did not go into the field either. The one exception was after I had already gone back to work in Shanghai: not quite able to let go, I went back to the village every weekend to farm. I grew one mu of ecological rice. In the later stages it developed sheath blight, and the harvest was dismal.

IV. The World of Agricultural Inputs

Actually putting together a 15-mu ecological rice plan still posed quite a challenge. Just the agricultural inputs alone were so numerous they were dazzling!

Compared with a decade or so ago, there are now an enormous number of commercial organic fertilisers on the market. Granular organic fertiliser applied by drone offers considerably more efficiency than traditional methods.

A local organic fertiliser manufacturer was pushing a type of “organic slow-release fertiliser“; the description mentioned “using agricultural waste such as straw to extract lignin, cellulose, alginic acid, chitosan and other natural polymeric organics and modify and activate them.” But on further investigation, I found its organic matter content was only 15% (the standard requires more than 30%), and looking at the standard it referenced, GB 15063-2020, it was actually a compound fertiliser!

Even among compliant organic fertilisers, there are quite a few types. By shape: powder, granular, and tonne bags. By the standard they meet: general organic fertiliser (NY/T 525-2021) and biological organic fertiliser (NY 884-2012). Prices can vary by a factor of 10 – the cheap ones at 400–500 yuan per tonne, the expensive ones at 4,000–5,000 yuan per tonne. The one thing all of them share is: you cannot find out where the materials actually come from, and even the list of ingredients is vaguely stated at best.

If you want to claim government subsidies, you must buy from organic fertiliser manufacturers on the government subsidy list.

After much comparison, in the end we still chose the “ancient” rapeseed cake. The raw material is transparent, and it is local, which saves long-distance transport. Of course, that means it is hard to apply mechanically, and no subsidy is available either.

The most frustrating irony was the seedling trays. We commissioned an organic farm in Suzhou to help with seedling raising, and only the day before rice transplanting did we discover that Suzhou uses 9-inch seedling trays while ours locally are 7-inch. Different sizes, and the rice transplanter simply could not use them!

◉ After a round of comparison, we gave up using any commercial fertiliser and chose traditional rapeseed cake, which can only be applied by hand.

V. Weed and Pest Control Plan

From February at the start of the year to mid-June, we were constantly drafting and revising the planting plan. We made trips to Zhenjiang, Wuzhong, Yichang, Ningbo, Kunshan and several other places, consulting rice experts, young returnees, ecological farming mentors and others on how to farm. We first settled on a basic weed control approach:

1 Before planting, flood the field first to create ideal water and temperature conditions for weeds, wait for one or two waves of grass to grow, then till and plant;

2 Transplant seedlings; do not direct seed;

3 The field must be levelled very flat, so that after transplanting and flooding, weeds will not grow easily.

We also set out a pest control approach:

1 Plant more sparsely for better air circulation;

2 Plant flower strips along the field edges to attract natural predators;

3 The first year will have more pests; by the second year, when the spiders arrive, it will be fine;

4 If all else fails, use biological microbial agents / biopesticides.

But I forgot that the essence of agriculture is uncertainty… The first rule of weed control – letting the field grow grass before transplanting – works best if you fallow in the second half of the year.

The large-scale grain farmer in my field had wheat as the previous crop, with harvesting usually around 20 May. So with transplanting in mid-to-late June, there was only one month – not enough time for grass to grow.

As if it knew I was going to farm, this year’s wheat harvest was a whole week later than usual! After the wheat was in, I hastily contacted a tractor operator I knew to come and do rotary tillage, but he was busy harvesting wheat and turning over land for a 2,000-mu large-scale farmer. It turned out every tractor operator in the whole town was busy harvesting wheat and turning over land for the large-scale farmers!

By the time I had made all the calls and the field was finally tilled, it was already 31 May – the Dragon Boat Festival!

◉ The persistent high temperatures of summer 2025 made this year’s rice-farming life even more difficult. On this day the high was 38°C, and I had to be out in the field before the sun came up.

◉ The sun goes down, and you keep working until dark before you can stop.

VI. Weeding the Paddy

Whether in ecological or conventional farming, tractors are essential. A modern tractor easily costs several hundred thousand yuan, so small farms and individual farmers like us have no choice but to rely on agricultural machinery cooperatives. Only after I started farming did I realise that the way farm machinery is operated has also been deeply shaped by large-scale conventional agriculture. The most obvious example is levelling.

Traditional Chinese farming places great emphasis on levelling the field. By my father’s account, it should be “like a mirror.” Only a perfectly level paddy can control weeds through irrigation, giving the rice a head start from the very beginning.

But large-scale conventional rice farming, underpinned by heavy use of herbicides, no longer places much emphasis on levelling. The tractor operators, too, tend to prioritise efficiency, and the levelling technique and quality leave much to be desired.

The result of this decline in skill is that we had to bend down and weed the paddy a total of four rounds, with some plots weeded five times. The “yun” in “geng yun” (tilling and weeding) specifically means weeding and treading the grass back into the paddy soil.

◉ Weeding the paddy this way, the 15 mu of fields were weeded four or five rounds.

◉ A comparison of weeded and unweeded paddy.

As a farmer who wants a harvest, I don’t want to – and can’t – say something so light and breezy as “coexisting with weeds.”

In the long stretches spent bending and hunching over during most of those 38°C heat days, I really despised the weeds. Then, at a certain moment – probably the day I was weeding out of sheer despair – I suddenly felt the urge to look up the names of those weeds. And so my attitude towards them truly changed.

Every weed has a name: rice leersia, Chinese smartweed, ear-based water amaranth, round-leaved knotweed, three-angled sedge, ditch pennywort. And these weeds are all also traditional Chinese medicinal herbs – for instance, Chinese smartweed is said to clear heat and detoxify, promote urination and unblock the urinary tract, resolve blood stasis and stop bleeding, and can be used to treat dysentery, infectious hepatitis, nephritic oedema, cystitis, carbuncles and boils, and snake or insect bites.

I plan to study and learn more about these paddy weeds in greater detail going forward.

◉ From top left, clockwise: Chinese smartweed (a paddy weed), barnyard grass, weeds pulled up and bundled together, and ear-based water amaranth (another paddy weed).

VII. Pests and Silkworms, One and the Same

The most dramatic twist came with the insects. As the weeding of the paddy progressed, the rice leaf folder and the yellow stem borer appeared first; then came sheath blight and rice planthoppers; the rice leaf folder and yellow stem borer kept turning over generation after generation.

What was to be done?

We started with blue and yellow physical sticky insect traps, but the results were so-so.

◉ We had first put up blue and yellow sticky insect traps in the field, but the effect was so-so.

I saw that another ecological farming friend had eventually resorted to a biological microbial agent – something permitted under organic agriculture. I figured I’d stock one up just in case and use it if things really went wrong (the spiders probably wouldn’t be enough in the first year).

Then, while I was reading through the product details, I suddenly noticed that the biological microbial agent was specifically designed to kill Lepidoptera – and silkworms are Lepidoptera!

Actually, that made sense. I had even deliberately kept two rice leaf folders and a yellow stem borer, just to observe their life cycles. In the end they pupated, emerged from the casing, and turned into moths – with eyes that looked startlingly alive. Moths and silkworm moths – aren’t they basically the same kind of creature!

◉ The moths in the field look much like silkworm moths, yet human attitudes towards them are completely polarised.

And so we decided to forgo even the biological microbial agent – go bare.

After “going bare,” the paddy still grew well, all the way through to a harvest at the Beginning of Winter.

I think the foundation of that success can be summed up in “Three Fields, Six Characters”: field patrol, field drying, and weeding the paddy.

◉ After patrolling the fields each day, washing my feet in the little river.

Field patrol means making sure to go through the fields every morning before the sun rises. The main thing is checking the water level. The loaches, crayfish, and eels in the paddy burrow through the bunds at night, and once they punch holes in the ridges, the water leaks out completely. As soon as the sun comes up, the weed seeds in the field will start germinating. Field patrol is about spotting the holes in time, plugging them, and refilling the water.

Field drying was done around early August, before the rice started jointing. The opposite of topping up water during patrol, field drying means draining the paddy completely and letting the rice stand in the sun until the soil cracks open. This encourages the rice roots to keep driving deeper, making the plants less prone to lodging and generally healthier.

The difference between weeding the paddy and ordinary weeding is that ordinary weeding just removes the grass, whereas weeding the paddy also means treading the pulled-up grass back into the mud – so the grass actually becomes fertiliser for the rice, a double benefit.

VIII. The Dream of Coming Home, Fulfilled

Looking back on this year’s farming: seedling raising on 10 May, rice transplanting on 20 June, four rounds of hand-weeding the paddy in between – weeds, insects, typhoons, heat, fungi, drought, all of it – and finally, on 5 November, a smooth harvest, completing the rice’s roughly 180-day life cycle. Although we, as human beings, put in a great deal of labour, much of the time it was nature alone at work – sunlight, rain, warm winds, soil, birds and beasts – brewing the fruits of the harvest. I can’t help but marvel at the power of nature! The final yield of the main variety came in at around 1,000 jin of fresh, unmilled grain per mu, soft, glutinous, and sweet to the taste. I was quite satisfied with the result, and proud of myself.

Fourteen years since coming home, and I had been walking the very edge of leaving. In the end, not only did I not leave – I also, for the “first time in history,” rented land that was not ours. Add our original mu of our own, and we had, for the “first time in history,” a 15-mu ecological rice paddy farm – and this farm was right in front of our own house!

Wasn’t this exactly the simple, hazy, beautiful wish we had fourteen years ago, to come home?

Thank you, silkworms!

◉ We will keep growing this 15 mu of rice right outside the front door this year, too.

First draft: 9 February 2026, 22nd day of the 12th month, Yi Si Year of the Snake

Revised: 23 February 2026, 7th day of the 1st month, Bing Wu Year of the Horse

Foodthink author

Yu Jiangang

Born and raised in Zhenghebang, a silk village in Jiangnan, he graduated from university in 2008 and worked in brand consultancy in Beijing. Driven by a concern for agriculture, rural areas, and farmers, he resigned in 2011 to become an intern at Little Donkey Farm; he then volunteered in Zhuang ethnic village communities on the Guangxi–Vietnam border, working in rural development. After returning home, he and his wife Mei Yuhui established “Mei and Fish” – devoted to the production of finely crafted silk quilts and the transmission of the craft – hoping to breathe life into China’s intangible cultural heritage of mulberry and sericulture, and to create new traditions. WeChat public account: Mei and Fish; Podcast: Tuanli Jiegou

All images, unless otherwise noted, are provided by the author

Editor: Tian Le