Women practitioners and women’s roles and experiences in agriculture and rural communities.
Lu Yinghong, a left-behind mother for seven years who studied early childhood education, bends in the polytunnels daily with women in their fifties and sixties uprooted by the peppercorn plunge. The farm offers income without travelling far — but the soil degrades in three to five years, the road ahead uncertain.
From a Beijing office to a Dong village in Qiandongnan, Chen Xi spent seven years building a timber house, growing nine varieties of rice reliably, and using the proceeds from 5,000 jin of purple rice to build the village’s first library for the children.
Three Beijing-drifter domestic workers — Suying, Huirong and Qiu Hua — plan a week’s menu for their employers yet cannot say what they themselves like to eat. On days off they stir-fry in Hongyan’s small kitchen for a tableful of sisters, and crouch on bare ground beside the tongzilou, planting Chinese chives and baby bok choy back in the soil.
Yang Xiuying and 70-year-old neighbour Deng Lian enter the hills before dawn, returning with hundreds of jin to peel, boil and dry all day—four to five hundred yielding under twenty. Children’s money is sporadic; social and medical costs top ten thousand yuan a year. She cannot stop.
Former consultant Chen Xi now organises members of the local clan to grow rice in the terraced fields of Yangdong Village, Qiandongnan, preserving more than twenty varieties of local paddy rice and grains and building a children’s library through purple rice charity sales.
Grandma Kouzi, in her sixties, has farmed for five years in Liancheng, Fujian, and is now fully self-sufficient in food apart from salt, working toward a complete self-sufficient system — water and electricity included — by the age of seventy.
In Youmi Village, north-west Yunnan, left-behind women, including Yuting and Ga Tu, are trialling water-saving upland rice. The NGO Farmers’ Seed Network, through Jinghong-based restaurant owner Haimei, found an old Jino variety, Sickler Rice, from Xishuangbanna, leaving a spark for staple food and rice-growing culture.
At a free farm machinery course at Fuyang’s Agricultural Broadcasting School, only 7 of 50 trainees were women — but from tractors to combine harvesters, through sweaty palms and crossed lines, they stopped back at the starting point, steady.
Zha Shiyire, a Huayao Yi girl from Shiping County, Yunnan, grew up in a deep-mountain village filled with endless farm work — from transplanting seedlings and harvesting rice to planting and curing tobacco. Her childhood ached in her ear, in her hands, and in her back.
The film follows a woman with no salary and no decision-making authority on an organic farm at the Yangtze River estuary. After bearing multiple physical and emotional labours, she loses her hometown, her mother, and the farm in turn — then leads the last cow into the reed flat.
