A Family Farm’s Books and Way of Life
Foodthink Says
People often ask: Does farming make money? Can young people who return to the countryside make a living? So we asked Tang Liang of Liangliang Farm in Chengdu to run the numbers for us and to share what it has been like going back to farm for six years.
If you, too, are a young returnee or thinking about going back, and you have more questions for Tang Liang, or want to share your own experience and views, feel free to leave a comment or submit a piece to Shitong-jun!
By Tang Liang
Liangliang Farm is right in my hometown, Niuqiao Village, Fuxing Town, Jintang County, in the Chengdu suburbs. It is a small family farm. We work just over 30 mu of land using environmentally friendly methods, growing mainly small yellow ginger, chillies, and other crops. Normally, nine of us share the same dining table: my father, my mother, my eldest uncle, my youngest uncle, my younger brother, my sister-in-law, my nephew, my niece, and me. Add one person from my second uncle’s household and we make ten. In terms of those involved in the farm’s day-to-day operations, that counts as six full-time workers.
Tang Liang (far left) and his family. Photography: Zhang Xiaomao
1
Liangliang Farm’s Income and Expenditure Counting from when I came home in 2013, this year is the sixth year my family and I have been running Liangliang Farm. The financial picture over these years is roughly as follows:
| “Liangliang Family Farm: Financial Overview of the Past Five Years” | ||
| Year | Gross Income (10,000 yuan) | Surplus (10,000 yuan) |
| 2013 | 3 | -3 |
| 2014 | 20 | 10 |
| 2015 | 25 | 12 |
| 2016 | 30 | 12 |
| 2017 | 30 | 12 |
*2013 and 2014 data are estimates.
After subtracting production and sales costs from each year’s income, along with an average of around 50,000 yuan invested in various hardware and facilities, the remaining “surplus” represents the farm workers’ labour income – roughly 2,000 yuan per person per month.
In 2017 specifically, Liangliang Farm’s total income was 307,681 yuan and total expenditure was 190,076 yuan, leaving a surplus of 117,605 yuan. Of the farm’s 300,000 yuan in gross income, 87.6% came from agricultural product sales and 12.4% from non-agricultural product income such as farm visit fees and lecture fees.
Of the farm’s 190,000 yuan in total expenditure, expenditure directly related to production amounted to 67,854.3 yuan, or 35.7%, covering land rent, agricultural inputs, short-term hired labour, processing materials, mechanised ploughing and harvesting, electricity, and event materials. Administrative expenses totalled 39,841.2 yuan, or 21%, including travel, daily office costs, training and study (5,536 yuan), personnel insurance, and external donations (3,420 yuan). Fixed asset expenditure was 45,712 yuan, or 24%. Courier and delivery-related expenditure was 36,668.5 yuan, or 19.3%.
How Liangliang Farm’s 190,000 yuan in expenditure was allocated in 2017.
2
30,000 Yuan Can Build a Farm, Too
As a small family farm, we didn’t have much cash available for direct investment. When I came home in 2013, I put up the just over 30,000 yuan I had saved from several years of work as the farm’s starting capital. That meant the farm’s infrastructure couldn’t be built all at once but had to be developed year by year – a little this year, a little next year. This way, the concentration of financial and labour input stays manageable, doesn’t disrupt the farm’s normal production, doesn’t tie up too much capital, and keeps resource allocation within a range the family can comfortably manage.
To put it plainly, we had no money. Without substantial capital, we couldn’t afford to hire people or buy much equipment, so we had to substitute our own labour for financial investment. Yes, the family works harder, but the process of gradually building things up year by year has also allowed us to see the farm – and ourselves – grow. In 2013 we dug a well, bought a lawnmower, built a chicken coop, ran internet cabling, bought a three-wheeler, bought a digital scale, set up a sealing machine, and bought jars for making doubanjiang (fermented bean paste). Over the following years we successively built a cellar, a pigsty, a biogas digester, a pavilion, a road, and a dry toilet, and bought a printer, a projector, a dryer, and shelving. In 2017 we built a water reservoir, installed a three-phase power supply, bought a mini tiller, and upgraded the farm’s visitor facilities.
A family farm also needs appropriate machinery to go with it. Two years ago we bought a ridger, and my brother Tang Jin finds it much easier to create the ridges each year.
Over these past few years, friends have often visited the farm (including Shitong-jun, who has been more than once!). The regulars always say: every year I come to your place, I notice a few more changes than the last.
3
Planning Production Around Market Demand
Now that we’ve talked about farm construction, let’s turn to production scale and sales. Before coming back, I had observed other farms and noticed that many aimed for size and completeness, only to run into serious cash-flow problems when sales slowed. So we’re careful to control our production scale and don’t expand blindly. In the first year we didn’t plant a large area; we started with small plots to try ecological farming. Once we felt things were on track, we gradually increased the area under ecological cultivation, matching our output to what the market can absorb. The remaining plots are left to rest – either planted with green manure (Chinese milk vetch, clover, sesbania, chicory, peas, broad beans, rapeseed, wheat, and so on) or simply left fallow.
A corner of the farm. Thirty mu of diversified production generating 300,000 yuan a year.
In trendy terms, I’d call this order-based production: I know who’s going to buy my products and roughly how much they’ll buy, so I plan my production around that quantity. Rather than producing in large volumes and then going out to find markets and channels. Over all these years, the farm has had essentially no product backlog. The occasional minor fluctuation stays within a manageable buffer, which helps us avoid potential risks.
People often mean well when they tell me: scale up, open a chain of farms, seek external investment, achieve economies of scale – as if that’s what constitutes success in business and in life. But I have no interest in opening dozens of chain farms or capturing a large market share, or even in making a certain amount of money. This is both because of my own understanding of agriculture (on the whole, farming is unlikely to be a path to enormous wealth) and because I don’t want a small family farm to become overly complicated.
Tang Liang is an active participant in the Chengdu Life Market. At the market, he has built stronger connections with local consumers and opened up sales channels outside Sichuan Province. More than a dozen small ecological farmers like Tang Liang take part in the Chengdu Life Market. Photography: Zhang Xiaomao, Shitong-jun
Since it’s a family farm, the workload should be something the family can largely handle on its own, without relying too heavily on outside labour. The farm’s size should be commensurate with the number of family members and their corresponding productive capacity. Under this arrangement, the farm’s work schedule is also more flexible and self-directed. If the farm gets too big, it exceeds what a family can manage, and you’d have to restructure how production is organised, moving into a different model altogether. We’d much rather see more family farms like ours – more families like this. More “Liangliang Farms,” not one very big Liangliang Farm.
Brother Tang Jin and sister-in-law Long Xinqiao harvesting the farm’s star product – small yellow ginger.
4
Run the Family Well, and You Can Run the Farm Well
Although I have no interest in making the farm bigger and more powerful, I am interested in how to make it more beautiful, better, and more vibrant. I’m also interested in how to keep a family in harmony, how to live happily, and how to treat this world with kindness. The world we live in now is no short of strategic planning gurus, life-coaching mentors, or business proposals – there are plenty of those – but it is rather short of people who find contentment, who discover meaning in everyday life, and who can feel happiness. That is the life my family and I want to live.
Over six years, Tang Liang (far left) has worked and lived alongside his family.
A family farm is the unity of family and farm. What underpins the farm is a family – on the surface you’re running a farm, but beneath the surface you’re running a family far more than that. My original intention in coming home was to use ecological farming as a way to bring a family scattered across different places back together. Before that, my father was working at a small factory in Chengdu, my mother ran a small tea house in town, my eldest uncle spent most of the year at home just getting by day to day, my youngest uncle was drifting about elsewhere, and my brother and sister-in-law were working at a factory in Guangdong, bringing along their baby son, my nephew Haohao. The family had been scattered across different places for over a decade. My brother and I were probably among the earliest generation of “left-behind children.” So I planted a thought in my mind early on: I hoped that one day the whole family could come back together. After these years of building up, though we’ve gone through all kinds of misunderstanding and twists and turns, that wish has genuinely come true, bit by bit: now the whole family works at home and lives at home. With the farm as the vessel, the family is reunited!
My brother, sister-in-law, and their two children.
Liangliang Farm took five years to essentially complete all the basic infrastructure the farm needed – in other words, the material foundations. Now, while we continue to optimise and upgrade the physical facilities, we are gradually shifting our focus towards the spiritual and cultural development of both the farm and the family: increasing the family members’ sense of well-being while exploring a sustainable way of living for the future, rather than chasing ever more material wealth. Our goal is simple: to live happily, and to care for this piece of land, so that the people here and the ecological environment here sustain one another, living sustainably.
5
Household Expenditure
People often ask me: on a monthly income of 2,000 yuan, is that enough for you? How do you manage? Admittedly, compared with what I used to earn, and compared with Sichuan Province’s average salary of over 5,000 yuan, our cash income is indeed quite low. Compared with Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, it’s even lower. But money is meant to be spent, so let’s take a look at some of the family’s day-to-day expenses.
The family’s vegetables come almost entirely from our own farm.
First, food. Because we’re right here on the land, most of our ingredients we can produce ourselves. You just need to put in a bit of labour, and all sorts of food grows from the soil – and it’s top-quality at that. This is very different from living in the city, where virtually everything you eat has to be bought. There are some ingredients we don’t grow or can’t grow, and we only buy those when we fancy a treat or something a little special.
Next, housing. Apart from the cost of building the house itself, there’s hardly any ongoing expense in this area. Moreover, the cost of building our own house is roughly 10% of the cost of buying one in central Chengdu – and it’s a “detached villa.” Although there may not be much prospect of capital appreciation, for the basic need of a place to live, this villa is perfectly adequate.
With just over 30,000 yuan in starting capital, Liangliang Farm has not only kept the family going over six years but also built a house.
For healthcare, education, elderly care, and other welfare needs, the local area also has a basic social security system in place. The children go to school locally, and if there’s a minor accident or illness, you just go to the local clinic. In township areas, the hardware and software in these areas may be a step below big-city standards on the whole, but the basic functions are there. As for balanced urban-rural development, that depends on government departments rebalancing the allocation of public goods and resources, and I hope the gap will gradually narrow.
On top of that, with the whole family together, it’s easy to supplement family education at home, and the elderly can be cared for at home. Living in the countryside, with a positive mindset, good ingredients, and a healthy living environment, you can bring down the risks and costs in this area considerably.
Mum and Dad are both at home – how lovely!
As for clothing, as long as you don’t chase designer labels and the latest trends, spending stays modest.
Getting around – most of the time we’re in the countryside, which is essentially a giant natural park. When we do head out for activities, including some training and study, I just treat it as a little trip.
Tang Liang’s father, his eldest uncle, and his youngest uncle at a museum.
All told, the family averages 2,000 yuan a month per person. It’s not a lot – the whole family’s income combined may not even match one person’s salary in the city – but with everyone working and living at home, day-to-day expenses stay low, and there’s none of the vanity spending and consumer bubbles you find in the city.
This pastoral way of life, with the whole family together in the countryside, is also one that I personally love. Satisfaction with your way of life is hard to measure in monetary terms. The family’s income is enough to build a house, cover the children’s education, the parents’ old-age care, ordinary medical costs and daily spending, to go out and see a bit of the world, and to add a few more physical upgrades to the farm – and I reckon that’s about all you need. A family farm like this is hardly about making a fortune, but it is more than enough to sustain a stable rural household. As for striking it rich, well, best not to worry about that. If you truly wanted to get rich, you certainly wouldn’t be running such a small family farm.
Shitong-jun visited Liangliang Farm just last November. Tang Liang’s family is wonderfully democratic – someone suggested having hotpot, and it passed unanimously! Then everyone got to work dividing up the tasks. Shitong-jun was assigned to go with Tang Liang to pick vegetables from the field: anything good for the pot was fair game. The lunchtime hotpot was packed with ingredients – three kinds of radish (carrot, white radish, water radish), pea shoots, Chinese cabbage, potato, lettuce, and black-leaf cabbage, all boiling away in a full pot. Photography: Shitong-jun
At our current level of income, the family basically doesn’t have to worry about food, clothing, housing, or transport. As long as no real emergencies come up, it counts as a fairly secure, comfortable life. A sense of happiness in life is not simply a function of income – you can live happily without earning a lot. Through all of this, what we see and feel is a sense of hope. Hope gives you strength, and we believe the farm will get better, and our lives will get better with it.
Small yellow ginger, still growing in the field.
6
Within the extended family, there are also smaller family units and individuals
In this extended family, we try hard to harness the wholeness of the farm-and-family while also respecting and accommodating the independence of each person and each small household, giving everyone their own space. Within the big family, each person or each small household’s finances are relatively independent – coordinated at the big picture, autonomous in the details.
Tang Liang’s nephews and nieces work and live on the farm alongside the family; they won’t end up as “left-behind children” the way their father and uncle did.
One extended family, one house built together, one kitchen shared, one car shared. We don’t need two or more sets of everything, which quietly brings down some of the costs. When it comes to shared household assets – say, buying a fridge – the family pools money together and buys it as one, bringing the power of cooperation into the home. In a society that so emphasises individual independence and the nuclear family, it can feel a bit like swimming against the current. In an extended family, people vary in age, education, even their upbringing and stage in life. Finding the right balance, addressing the different concerns of different family members, so that everyone can live in peace – that takes the whole family working at it together.
“Cultivate oneself, bring order to the family, govern the state, and bring peace to the world” – this is a spiritual legacy passed down among the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation. As for me, I’m living out the “cultivate oneself, bring order to the family” part: giving myself peace of mind, giving my family peace of mind, tending a piece of land – and that’s all there is to it.
In October 2018, Tang Liang returned to Little Donkey Citizen Farm at the foot of Fenghuangling in Beijing for the farm’s 10th-anniversary event. Little Donkey Farm is the “Whampoa Military Academy” for many young people returning to the countryside. Photography: Shitong-jun
Foodthink
Author
Tang Liang
Tang Liang is from Niuqiao Village, Fuxing Town, Jintang County, Chengdu, Sichuan, and the first university graduate in his family. He graduated from Southwest University in 2008 with a degree in biological sciences and worked in Chongqing after graduation. In 2011, he quit his job and headed north, going on to work and study at Little Donkey Citizen Farm and then Share Harvest. In 2013, he returned to his hometown of Chengdu, where he founded Aijiayuan · Liangliang Farm, practising gentle farming and bringing together the rural family.
Editor: Chang Tianle
Images: All provided by the author unless otherwise credited
Graphics: Zhang Xiaoshu
Layout: Niuniu
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