To Farm, He Opened a Noodle Factory
Three months ago, a young couple farming in Gansu welcomed a baby and named him “Mai Zi” (Wheat Grain). On WeChat Moments, his mother Shi Tou wrote: “I hope our little Yin Maizi, who came into the world in Shi Tou’s fields, will grow as tenaciously as our sandy-land Hong Guang Tou wheat — walking the road of life with firm and steady strides, loving himself first and then those around him, clear-headed and kind, grateful for life, savoring every experience, while Shi Tou, Mai Zi, and Hua Hua walk this earthly road together, growing side by side until each of us has forged a grand path through the world that is truly our own.”
Before this little “Mai Zi” was born, his father Hua Hua and mother Shi Tou had already been farming their family land in Gansu for close to ten years. Together they founded a noodle brand, “Yanguiqing“, built around the North-West traditional variety “Hong Guang Tou” wheat — and, in a feat rare among young people who return to the countryside, they “established” their own noodle-processing factory.
In truth, what Hua Hua wants most is to farm the land himself, especially chickpeas. As a boy, he lived up on the hills above Wuwei, and back then chickpeas grew thick along every field border and plot edge. Fried in oil and eaten straight from the pan, they were wonderfully fragrant.
In the 1990s, under the government’s “settlement contraction” policy, the family moved down from the hills to a village near the Huangguan Canal (an irrigation channel drawing water from the Yellow River) and stopped growing chickpeas. But the memory never left him, and it became one of the forces that drew him back to farming.
Once he was truly home, though, the sheer volume of piecemeal tasks — scouting and renting land, supervising cultivation, setting up a factory, hauling workers, handling sales, running livestreams — left Hua Hua too stretched to tend his chickpea field with the care it deserved.
Flour processing is a sure bet for profit; farming is a sure bet for loss. Faced with the arithmetic of real-world income and expenditure, payment cycles, and risk, how does one hold on to the original vision of ecological farming? Hua Hua and Shi Tou’s answer is a hard one: you have to survive first.
I. Sharing the Risk
But in 2016, once back home, he ended up as a “middleman” instead. The Yanguiqing cooperative platform he was part of worked with farmers to buy specialty heirloom varieties — sandy-land Hong Guang Tou wheat. This is a local variety grown in the Hexi Corridor on dry land covered with Gobi stones: low-yielding, but with a strong wheat aroma and a springy, chewy texture that makes it particularly well suited to milling into flour and noodles. For a young man in his twenties with no savings, leasing land cost far more than processing, and playing middleman was the steadier route into entrepreneurship.
That was not, however, what Hua Hua had set out to do. He had hoped to lease land from farmers and work it himself. But after three consecutive years, the twenty-odd mu of land he had found in his own village all produced poorly. In a desert climate where everything depends on the weather and evaporation is intense, Hong Guang Tou yield is almost entirely a function of rainfall — as low as under 100 jin per mu at the worst, and at most around 400 jin, a fraction of what conventional cultivation yields. So farmers have gradually moved toward larger scale, and these days it is rare to find smallholders planting anywhere near that many mu.
In 2017–2018, Hua Hua lost his business partner and had to start over alone. In earlier reports, his entrepreneurial history had been described as “defeat after defeat.” Fortunately, in 2018 he met Shi Tou, a girl from Shaanxi — steady and dependable, a name that truly fits; she likes to joke that Hong Guang Tou’s fragrant noodle aroma is what “tricked” her into coming.
Also in 2018, Hua Hua found a new partner — Uncle Su, a major grain grower in Sitang Township, Jingtai, some 80 km from Gulang County. The area is well suited to Hong Guang Tou as well; the sandy land Uncle Su opened up single-handedly comes to nearly 1,000 mu. With his facilitation and management, Hua Hua has already reached wheat-purchase agreements with growers covering 2,000 mu in Sitang.
Shi Tou points out that in recent years, with the economy sluggish, Hong Guang Tou at 2 yuan per jin costs twice as much as ordinary wheat and has not been selling well locally, while farmers’ stores cannot hold the grain that has piled up over several years. All of this has made Hua Hua’s “large-scale” buying easier — his purchase price runs a few mao higher, sometimes reaching 2.6 or 2.7 yuan.
In a sense, Hua Hua’s ability to work with farming peers and source wheat that meets ecological farming standards is also an “arithmetic problem” with clear economic logic. When drought caps the yield, the extra production that chemical fertiliser could bring is almost negligible. In recent years, the average Hong Guang Tou yield in Sitang has been barely over 100 jin per mu. Even if farmers habitually apply 3 to 5 jin of chemical fertiliser per mu, that uneconomical habit can be changed.
More importantly, on the new sandy land, herbicide has no role to play at all — before the stones were laid, the sandy ground was bare wasteland, exposed to wind and sun, with few grass seeds, and for the first ten years barely any weeds grew.
Hua Hua admits that cooperative purchasing shifts a measure of risk onto the farmers: whether the crop fails entirely or the flour cannot be sold, Yanguiqing does not bear the loss. He also only settles payment for the previous batch of wheat each time he takes delivery of a new one, keeping his cash flow relatively comfortable. Yet this is still a win born of necessity — as an outsider from another village, if Hua Hua leased land himself, rents would be higher and the risk he carried would be far greater than the farmers’.
Uncle Su is also better able to “oversee” the cooperative farmers than Hua Hua — as the local “king of farm machinery,” he controls the means of production and can track from the source which villagers need to rent equipment for spraying pesticides.
But flavour alone cannot translate into income for the villagers of Sitang Township. With government funding, Sitang has built reservoirs and is looking to lay drip irrigation infrastructure and develop high-standard farmland. Once the drought constraint is lifted, farmers may flock to plant higher-profit conventional sandy-land fruits and melons. Ecology and livelihood are hard to reconcile, and their partnership with Hua Hua may not last.
Fortunately, the laying of water pipes in the village has been shelved again. Hua Hua has not yet found new cooperative farmers. He plans to find some land in a village near the noodle factory to run another “experiment” — no stones, just plant Hong Guang Tou directly.
II. Advancing into “Secondary Industry”
The key to making money from wheat is processing it well and selling it.
But at first, noodle processing was also a loss-maker. At a contract factory, once the production line starts running it processes a large volume of noodles; if sales are slow, the noodles just sit in the warehouse waiting to go rancid, with high wastage.
Flour milling is also a cost. At its peak it was 800 yuan per tonne; by 2023 it had dropped to 300 yuan per tonne.
In 2023 the opportunity arrived: a village-collective noodle factory in Zhitan Town, Wuwei, was mismanaged and put up for lease. This small factory had all its production licences in order and plenty of space; Hua Hua and Shi Tou made the decisive move to take it over.
Having a noodle factory that was truly “their own” gave Yanguiqing its first real control over production. Three or four full-time staff are on standby at all times, processing and packing several different flavours of noodles. It is easier to trial new flavours, and they can also process noodles for other farming peers, earning a processing fee. They are now essentially running every day, with a daily output of 300 to 400 jin, consuming around 100 tonnes of flour a year.
If sales pick up, greater output is within reach — the 4,000 mu of new sandy land in Uncle Su’s village can supply over 400 tonnes of flour in total, four times their current annual consumption.
But the two of them are stretched too thin. As early as 2024, Yanguiqing wanted to hire a full-time employee who could help manage the factory; by 2025, they also want to hire someone for livestreaming — livestream commerce has caught on in the ecological farming community too. Shi Tou had been livestreaming from the sandy fields, pulling noodles on camera, with good results in the first half of the year. But in the second half, with the baby due, orders increasing, and the small family busier than ever, the livestreams were put on pause.
III. Rain Drenches the “Chickpea Dream”
But the dream meets reality — the chickpeas often fail entirely. Over four years, he has been losing money on this land and was forced to shrink his operation to 200 mu in just one of the two villages.
“So much weed again!” Stepping over the fence into the field, that was the first thing Hua Hua said. It takes an hour and a half to drive from home, and he is simply stretched too thin to visit often.
In a Gansu where irrigation is scarce and farmland is predominantly dry land, Hua Hua had once been incredibly grateful to have rented this gem of a plot blessed with natural rainfall, at just 100 yuan a mu.
But he never expected the rain to be this much. The weeds grow right back after they are pulled, and they have become his single biggest cost.
In June last year, to weed 100 mu, he hired workers for a straight month — at peak, up to 60 people in a day, 500 yuan per mu, bringing the total bill to close to 50,000 yuan.
This year he changed his approach to hiring. He uses his new energy vehicle to shuttle day labourers from the village, 120 yuan a person a day. One car carries only four, so he hired a second — eight people in all, 160 yuan each, people and vehicle combined. It is the height of the farming season: Hua Hua gets up just after five in the morning, drives the workers to the field, and does not drop them back at the village until seven in the evening. He is home just after eight.
This year the rain has been even heavier. One round of weeding is no longer enough, but if he were to weed again, “even if the chickpeas sold for 50 yuan a jin, it would still be a loss.”
It was also this year that he first heard the Tibetan farmers here were beginning to use herbicide.
Besides the weeds, when rainfall is too abundant, this cold-hardy, drought-loving legume also goes into excessive vegetative growth — it puts all its energy into stems and refuses to set seed. Pinch a chickpea pod in the field with your fingers and it is hollow. August is supposed to be the critical growing period for chickpeas.
Hua Hua says that if the weather clears up now, the hollow pods might still fill in a little, but if the rain keeps falling, there will be almost no harvest this year — after National Day, snow is due in Tian zhu, and the growing season will be over almost immediately.
Last August, Tian zhu also had a full month of rain without a break. Into September the rain was still falling; the black earth was still muddy and sticky underfoot two or three days later, which also hampered the harvest. The chickpeas had developed small black mould spots and looked poor. Even though Hua Hua and Shi Tou sorted them twice — once by machine, once by hand — and specifically flagged the condition on the sales platform, some customers still asked for refunds after receiving their order.
This August, while we were walking the fields in Tian zhu, the sky went overcast before three in the afternoon. Soon after we got back in the car, rain the size of beans was hammering the windows.
As long as the losses are not too devastating, Hua Hua still does not want to give up this beautiful plot of his own — a place he sees as ideal for retirement. He is considering laying mulch film over the chickpea field next year to suppress the vigorous weeds. That means even more labour costs: as it stands, Hua Hua and Shi Tou drive their own tractor and seeder, and the only per-mu expense is seed and fuel, running just a few dozen yuan a mu.
“I am spending a fortune to enjoy life here,” he says.
IV. The Gamble of Farming
Chickpeas command a high unit price and enjoy strong market recognition. Hua Hua can also gather local heirloom varieties from relatives and smallholders at the farmers’ market. If the weather cooperates, it is genuinely worth going all in.
He has also expanded his linseed acreage. Linseed is tougher against both drought and waterlogging, and the harvest is more reliable — before this year’s crop even came in, all of Hua Hua’s linseed had already been bought out in full by an ecological processor. That said, factoring in the costs of transport, oil extraction, packaging, and sales at every stage, the purchase price may not be all that high. Both Gansu and Qinghai grow linseed, so supply-side competition is no small thing. Hua Hua does not dare push production much further.
In one year, at the county government’s initiative, Hua Hua also tried goji berries. The crop is delicate and labour-intensive, but even on the conventional market it can fetch 10 to 20 yuan a jin — a handsome return.
But the seedlings supplied to the farmers turned out to be faulty, and the goji crop was wiped out entirely. On 200 mu, Hua Hua lost several hundred thousand yuan; someone in the neighbouring village lost over two million — that farmer had been spraying once a week with dozens of people in the field weeding every single day. In the end, the head of the Forestry and Fruit Bureau was “taken away,” and the promised government subsidy of 200 yuan per mu was never paid. Hua Hua was almost glad his own land had been tended more sparingly and that he had not sunk in as much money.
In this sense, farming is not merely an arithmetic problem but a “betting” one. Beyond natural disasters and the calendar of the seasons, swings in purchase prices, defects in fruit seedlings and seed — all of these seem beyond a farmer’s power to withstand.
In the other village where Hua Hua cooperates in Tianzhu, the government once mandated that they must grow broad beans. Broad beans need to be processed before they can be sold, and demand in the ecological farming circle is small, so Hua Hua had been reluctant to take them on. But it happened that broad bean prices were high that year — five or six yuan a jin — and he sold them on the conventional market for over 20,000 yuan, which went entirely toward covering losses from his other crops that year.
In the minds of Gansu farming peers, the unpredictability of prices is most starkly illustrated by onions. The input for a mu of onions runs to several thousand yuan, with a yield of nearly 10,000 jin per mu. When the purchase price hits five or six mao per jin, a single mu can net one or two thousand yuan.
But there are also years when no one comes to buy, or the price collapses. When the purchase price falls below two mao, a bumper harvest becomes a year of bankruptcy. On short-video apps, farmers in Gansu and Henan regularly post clips of onions rotting in the field. “But have you not seen how much they make when the price is good?” Hua Hua adds.
Growing onions is like gambling. In truth, the fate of most crops is the same.
So some farmers reason that, with so many variables beyond anyone’s control, it is better to let Heaven decide one’s fate than to “gamble” against the market.
At his base in Tianzhu, Hua Hua grows chickpeas and linseed, with potatoes and buckwheat in rotation. We noticed that beneath a thick, luxuriant stand of buckwheat there is a “hidden” layer of potato shoots. This was supposed to be a potato plot that got mulch film and careful sowing this year. But last year’s fallen buckwheat scattered seed all over the ground and upstaged the main act; now the free-growing buckwheat has already outgrown the hand-planted potatoes.
“How about we just harvest the buckwheat, then?” we asked.
“I have been thinking the same thing,” Hua Hua replied.
“Here is yet another ‘unexpected harvest,’ I suppose.” He mused, and you could not tell whether the tone was bitter or optimistic.
V. A North-West Strongman Finds His Place
He describes the most common wild animal on the North-West grassland — the marmot — “It is the one in the emoji packs, the one going ahhhhh.” He nearly works his mouth and face into the expression as he speaks.
Then there was the hog badger that had just darted into the chicken coop — a wild animal rarely seen locally. “It had a chicken in its mouth, its belly soft and round, just like mine. And it strolled right on through, not giving me a shred of respect!”
Family members recall that Hua Hua was clever, but after landing in a private school with a poor academic culture in high school, he had no head for study and went straight off to Xinjiang to work. He eventually got into a second-tier university, then took a leave of absence to join a rural reconstruction and community-supported agriculture programme. Back in 2018, his WeChat account would repost articles on the ecological challenges of sandy-land farming; today he remains firmly committed to no pesticides, no fertiliser as the foundational principle of how he grows his crops.
Hua Hua admits that in the past, he would often act on impulse, half-cocked and muddled. When he returned to the village in 2016, he kept five or six dogs for a while, describing himself as a “little gang boss”: every time he went out, the pack would follow in a grand procession, “imposing as hell.”
He loves to explore and strike out on his own. Turn into a road he has never walked and he will want to go in, walk to the very end, see what is there. The villages and towns around his home have been mapped out by him to the last alley — he knows every nook and cranny.
But approaching his fortieth year, he genuinely wants to “settle down,” to prove to his family that his ecological farming is a solid, promising “proper enterprise.” He “disbanded” the dog pack, keeping just two to guard the noodle factory.
Shi Tou has taken the books over from Hua Hua — every purchase of agricultural inputs, every single transaction, has to be recorded properly. Hua Hua’s “grandly ambitious” new ideas (even during our visit, he was still in talks with a local premium vinegar producer about noodle-and-vinegar processing) do not automatically get the “approval.” Sometimes he wants to sneak behind Shi Tou’s back and quietly expand into something, but more often he finds himself reflecting that, with such a good wife by his side, he feels as though his heart has finally settled.
In the early hours of 22 September, Shi Tou gave birth to a son, mother and baby both safe and well. There are more things to spend money on in the household now. After National Day, the chickpeas in Tian zhu will also need Hua Hua to go and harvest them himself.
Unless otherwise credited, all photographs in this article are by the author.
Editor: Tian Le