“You scored so highly just to learn rice transplanting?” An agronomy student graduates amid misunderstandings and follower growth

“Your father worked himself to the bone in the fields to keep you in school, and in the end you got into university to carry on his trade.”

“The way you’re doing this rice transplanting has completely disgraced your parents.”

“Xiaoxiong, you’re doing great, but remember to tie your hair up and stay safe.”

“Hello, my handsome boy was admitted to the agronomy programme at xx University last year. I wanted to ask, miss, how is the agronomy programme?”

……

Xiaoxiong is a postgraduate student in agronomy and a short-video creator, continually documenting her day-to-day life in agronomy on her phone. In a few of her viral videos on Douyin, fans offer encouragement, strangers raise doubts, and parents of gaokao candidates ask for advice about their children applying for agronomy.

In the past two years, agronomy students have become a hot topic on the internet. Some question agronomy students, claiming that they “struggle to find work after graduation”, “can only sit civil-service exams or seek public-sector establishment posts”, or “have spent so many years studying only to go back to farming”. Others are curious about the rice, wheat, fruit, pears and peaches that agronomy students painstakingly cultivate, and praise these graceful crops along with the vitality of agronomy students.

In the face of the many debates and imaginations surrounding agronomy students, Xiaoxiong wants to present their real life as best she can, but doing so is far from easy.

As an agronomy student conducting field trials, Xiaoxiong does not shy away from showing the hardships and moments of breakdown of farm work. Her first pinned video shows her on a rainy evening, using a machine to break up the straw.

Such difficult moments are far from rare. But when she sees that people always look upon agronomy students’ hardships with a sympathetic, pitying gaze, she also wants to convey the vitality of agronomy students. That is the state of flow that comes from physical labour, the sense of achievement from cultivating crops, the physical and mental pleasure that comes from close contact with nature, and the deep bonds forged through work with fellow students in her academic family.

On the other hand, agronomy is not the same as agricultural labour; the ultimate goal is still research output. Recording data on paper and pen in a rice paddy that is already difficult to walk through, and patiently taking samples and numbering them, afraid of compromising the accuracy of the experiment—such a scene may be a memory unique to agronomy students. Some have also questioned Xiaoxiong’s poor cropping and low yields. Xiaoxiong is also quite helpless about this, because her research focus is low-carbon agriculture and sustainable farming, and she needs to obtain data on the greenhouse gases emitted by rice paddies without fertiliser application.

But sometimes Xiaoxiong also doubts herself: “While carrying out field trials, I also realise that these techniques will be of little use in our future work, because we cannot out-farm actual farmers. Our research aims to reduce carbon emissions and does nothing to improve yields at all. Even if some classmates’ research is aimed at increasing yields, in the short term no agricultural company will adopt these techniques. The jobs we most commonly find in the market are still sales jobs—selling agricultural inputs such as seeds, pesticides and chemical fertilisers.”

In June 2026, Xiaoxiong graduated successfully from Huazhong Agricultural University. During her job search, she gained a deeper understanding of how difficult agronomy employment is. Sometimes she wonders whether there are now too many agronomy students. Are there any other ways out? Perhaps short videos are the most suitable self-help tool for agronomy students?

In this episode of Food Talk, we invite Xiaoxiong to chat about her agronomy experience. From the daily life of agronomy students, to short-video entrepreneurship, to the different prospects for agronomy employment, and to the difficulties and significance of the agronomy programme in our era, Xiaoxiong, who has just finished her student life, has many thoughts to share with everyone.

If you are also curious about the lives of agronomy students, please click to listen to this episode of Food Talk.

01:23 Xiaoxiong, an agronomy student for seven years, has a dual identity: a Huazhong Agricultural University master’s graduate and a short-video creator with 26,000 followers.

03:44 When “a young girl working in the fields” becomes a recipe for viral attention, it also attracts vicious comments: “You scored so highly just to learn rice transplanting?”

05:20 Facing anxious private messages from parent followers: agronomy jobs are hard to find, the child cannot sleep, and the parents worry even more.

08:10 Cyber farmer versus independent vlogger

12:37 An MCN approaches, offering a 50/50 split and a 500,000 penalty for breach

20:50 What exactly do agronomy students do in the fields every day? From growing rice, fertilising, and irrigating to weeding and pest control, real agronomy research is far more than simply “working in the fields”.

27:53 Working until nine at night, taking notes under the street lamp; the rapeseed was stolen three times, and it isn’t worth calling the police.

33:25 With all this hardship and difficulty, why does the life of agronomy students still seem so full of vitality?

39:06 Why do agronomy students so easily form deep academic-family bonds? After everyone has worked through it together, they all find each other much more pleasing to look at.

52:41 The employment reality: it is harder for female agronomy students; starting salaries in bioinformatics are 8,000, while traditional field work offers only 5,000 to 6,000?

62:10 Perhaps one day agronomy students will also stand under the mainstream spotlight: “Xiaoxiong”, who has already graduated and found a job, offers some advice to young people currently studying agronomy or about to start it: actively find your own way forward, develop skills, and don’t draw conclusions about your future too early.

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