10 Yuan an Hour: Fallback and “Freedom” for Yunnan’s Strawberry Pickers

It is June on the plateau, and a rain has just swept through. The wind rolls down from the ridgelines, cold enough to cut to the bone, carrying the smell of damp earth and strawberry leaves. Looking out into the distance, patches of white polytunnels stretch across the lush green knolls, like rows of sleeping silkworms resting on mulberry leaves.

This is Mashu Town, Qiaojia County, Zhaotong City, Yunnan Province. The high altitude brings low temperatures, the mountainous terrain produces wide swings between day and night, and the land here is flatter and more open than the surrounding area. Leveraging these natural conditions, Mashu has become the country’s second-largest summer strawberry growing base. In 2025, the town’s officially registered planting area reaches 25,000 mu (about 1,670 hectares), providing over 9,000 person-times of employment.

Strawberry cultivation is a textbook example of labour-intensive farming. The delicate fruit is hidden among the leaves, and the slightest carelessness will bruise it. Every stage of the process requires manual work. Step into a polytunnel and you will see that nearly everyone bent over the ridges is a woman.

In May this year, two traffic accidents involving rural women workers struck the country one after another. In Dandong, Liaoning Province, a minibus loaded with blueberry pickers rolled over, killing eight and injuring 13. In Hechi, Guangxi, a pickup truck carrying sweet potato workers plunged into water; in the end, ten people died. The women who pick fruit behind large-scale cultivation — and the hardships and risks they carry — are gradually coming into public view.

Mashu Town’s strawberry pickers belong to this group as well. Some are in their fifties or sixties, earning what they can to cover food and old-age needs while their bodies still permit. Others are local left-behind mothers, striving to balance looking after their families with independent work. In the strawberry farm, they work ten to eleven hours a day — bending the vines, weeding, picking fruit — trading mud-caked hands for wages of around 100 yuan.

For these rural women, the strawberry industry offers a way to step outside the house and earn their own money without having to travel far. And yet they remain on the lowest rung of the industry. As rural China transforms — smallholder farming crumbling, men leaving to work elsewhere — they, whether lacking education and skills or shouldering the burden of caring for the family, have at times been passive ones left behind on the land. The strawberry farm has given them a fallback for making a living. But can this fallback lead even to a measure of freedom?

A Left-Behind Mother’s Decision

This year, during the first lunar month, 27-year-old Lu Yinghong decided to go work at the strawberry farm with her husband’s aunt.

The strawberry industry in Mashu Town, where her husband’s family is from, began about ten years ago. Those who first contracted the land were mostly outsiders who had planting experience in Daibu Town in the neighbouring Huize County and other places, and who had then come to Mashu, with its similar geography and climate. Near the town centre, the land was first cleared of maize and potatoes, and polytunnels were put up.

Over the following years, strawberry farms sprang up like mushrooms after rain. Caopidi Village, where Lu Yinghong’s in-laws live, is about a half-hour’s drive from the town centre. Around 2022, both villagers and outside contractors began growing strawberries here as well, one of the plots right behind Lu Yinghong’s house. The middle-aged and elderly women of the village were hired to do the work — ten hours a day, 10 or 11 yuan an hour, with work available for roughly five or six months a year. The pay was not high, but it was better than farming at home.

Lu Yinghong saw it and was tempted. But at the time her eldest daughter was only three and still needed looking after, and she soon became pregnant again. It was not until early this year, when her second daughter turned two and was weaned, that she actually went into the polytunnels.

“I used to dream of standing at the three-chi lectern; who would have thought I’d end up stuck in dozens of mu of strawberry fields.” Lu Yinghong is young and educated, and among the women workers at the strawberry farm she stands out. Half a year after starting in the polytunnels, she posted this on WeChat Moments.

She was born in a mountain village in Chongxi, the neighbouring town, where the hills are steeper and life is harder. As a child she was a left-behind child; her grandparents could see to her food and clothing but paid little attention to her studies or social life. She says she was originally a good student, strong in Chinese, but her grades later slipped and her family did not step in with support in time, so she began to let herself go.

Even so, after finishing junior secondary school, Lu Yinghong was admitted to a vocational school in the county seat to study early childhood education — at the time, the gross enrolment ratio for senior secondary education in Qiaojia County as a whole was only 42%. But like many girls from mountain villages, she met a boyfriend in the county seat. Once her boyfriend, who was in the militia, finished his training, Lu Yinghong decided to drop out and go to Fujian with him to work. Her parents did not object; their view was simple: “If you will not go to school yourself, whatever life you end up living after this has nothing to do with us.”

The work in Fujian lasted only three months. After that, the couple went back to the boyfriend’s hometown, married, and had a child. That year, Lu Yinghong was just 20.

In the seven years after the marriage, Lu Yinghong says she was “a left-behind woman 80% of the time” — her husband first worked in a factory, then did scrap-metal trading in Anhui and Kunming. She lived with her in-laws, washing clothes, cooking, and looking after the children at home. Farming was no exception to her duties: she was responsible for feeding the chickens and pigs, and in harvest season she helped her mother-in-law gather potatoes, “going round from morning till night.”

In Mashu she knew no one — no relatives, no friends — and lived only within the small circle of the family. Friction with her in-laws was inevitable, and the separation from her husband brought arguments: “There are some things that never get resolved. Every time I bring them up and explain them to him again, but nothing ever changes on his side.”

From the husband’s family’s perspective, though, Lu Yinghong’s life was already quite “happy”. Mashu’s natural conditions are better than those of her maiden family, and her father-in-law does concrete pouring between towns and villages, which counts as a decent income locally. Her husband is honest and quiet; when there is a conflict he does not resort to hitting or shouting. Working away from home, he sends money back every month, and the family built a new house with tiled floors. In their eyes, Lu Yinghong is the one “making a fuss.”

In such a life, negative emotions welled up. “I keep denying myself — feeling like I can’t look after the children properly, can’t manage the household properly, can’t do the farm work properly either.” Sometimes she felt lost: “If I had not been so headstrong before, if I had studied properly, would things be different now?”

It was not that Lu Yinghong had not tried to change things. Seeing other couples going out together, she had thought about leaving with her husband to work away, to strengthen their bond and also improve the family’s finances. But the thought that their children might become left-behind children, repeating her own childhood experience, made her abandon the idea.

Around the time of her second daughter’s birth, she needed to go to the hospital in the county seat frequently, and on top of the friction with her in-laws, she proposed to her husband that she take the children and rent a place in the county seat, enrolling her eldest daughter in a kindergarten there too. Her husband reluctantly agreed and sent her money each month. Though she was looking after her eldest daughter, sitting out her confinement period, breastfeeding, and cooking on her own, she found that stretch “a bit easier” — she only had to mind the children, not juggle farm work and housework on top. But after just a year and a half, her husband’s income became unstable, and asking him for rent and living expenses grew difficult for Lu Yinghong.

Under the financial pressure, she and her daughters went back to the village and lived with her in-laws again.

The strawberry farm, on the other hand, showed Lu Yinghong a path that let her be with her children while also stepping outside the house — previously, in the county seat, which lacked industry, even hotpot restaurants and snack stalls had been unwilling to hire a mother who needed to look after her children as a server. The strawberry farm is only a ten-minute walk from home, and she could finally earn money.

When she first arrived at the strawberry farm in the lunar New Year month, Lu Yinghong felt anxious, because since leaving school she had done no more than five or six odd jobs — working in a factory in Fujian, helping to pave roads around the village — and none for long. She was afraid she would not do well enough and the boss would pick on her. Even with a relative showing her the ropes, she kept asking, “Is this how you do it?” but quickly learned to strip out the old strawberry leaves.

This job lasted only 18 days and earned her two thousand yuan. After the winter maintenance at the strawberry farm ends, there is no work again until closer to summer. But getting paid, Lu Yinghong felt she had “affirmed herself for one minute.” “It just felt like I could do it on my own — as long as you are willing to take the first step, there is nothing you cannot do.”

She recalls the days two years ago, when she was looking after her children alone in the county seat — her youngest was just four months old, and one time both children fell ill and she had to tend to them simultaneously during IV drips at the hospital. “I felt like I was falling apart then. It was as if whether I had family or a husband no longer mattered; only money could give me a sense of security. But what I lacked most was money.”

The Fallback Work, Left for Women

The strawberry farm where Lu Yinghong works employs around ten workers a day. They are mostly left-behind mothers and middle-aged or elderly women. The only two men are both middle-aged or elderly with special circumstances — one has never married, and the other injured his leg while building a house and can no longer do heavy work.

Why are most of the workers women? Lu Yinghong tells me that on the one hand, young and middle-aged men can choose to work in other provinces for higher pay; on the other hand, there are also gendered expectations at play: “Some men might set their sights too high, think the pay is low, and also feel this kind of work is a bit embarrassing to be seen doing… Because they feel growing strawberries is something women should do, and if a man does it, people will laugh at him and he will lose face.”

Women are the backbone of strawberry cultivation, but they are often not the ones running or contracting the farms. Many of the local middle-aged and elderly women are illiterate, and what they do is repetitive, backbreaking work with little in the way of technical skill.

At another strawberry farm in Caopidi Village, the operator, Ma Guoguang, tells me he is a villager from the same village. A few years ago, he and his wife grew vegetables in polytunnels in Luliang County, Qujing. But when the vegetable market turned bad, they made no money, and three years ago they returned home. With a 15,000-yuan agricultural loan and the help of a relative, they turned this plot into a strawberry farm. Between their own land and what they had contracted, it came to a dozen or so mu in total. After deducting the cost of pesticides, fertiliser, and labour, they earned seven or eight thousand yuan per mu in the first year.

Ma Guoguang now employs five or six workers, all middle-aged or elderly women from the village. He says the work in a strawberry farm requires a careful mind and a steady hand, and women do it better than men.

Chen Minglian is one of them. Of her two daughters, one is married in the same village, with a child just over two years old; the other married into the neighbouring county, and no one knows where her son-in-law is working — “They have their own burdens; honestly, they can barely look after themselves,” she says. She does not count on her children to help her. Since last year, Chen Minglian has been working at Ma Guoguang’s strawberry farm, while her husband stays home to feed the livestock and look after her parents-in-law.

This year she is 56, and her hair has gone grey, her face deeply furrowed. At the time of the interview, she is wearing an apron, the front pocket stuffed with small red plastic forks, as she propagates the runners. She bends down, tears an opening in the plastic film beside an existing plant, draws out a sprawling strawberry runner, and uses the little fork to pin it into the soil at the gap — this is the most effective way to multiply the strawberry plants. Once the runner’s roots have taken hold, she trims the connection back to the mother plant. The same motion, Chen Minglian repeats hundreds of times a day.

And it is the technical work that is still left to the “bosses.” While Chen Minglian pins down the runners, Ma Guoguang is preparing to spread fertiliser in the field. He says that this kind of work is done by him and the relative he partners with, and is not handed over to the workers.

Outsiders “Pushed” In

As the strawberry industry has expanded, a gap has begun to open in the local labour market. A number of strawberry farms, particularly those contracted on a large scale by outsiders, have started recruiting workers from neighbouring towns and villages.

Li Chaodong is from Huize County, Qujing. He has contracted roughly 50 mu of land in each of Mashu Town and neighbouring Laodian Town for strawberry cultivation. By his estimate, local labour had already run out four or five years ago. Of the seven or eight thousand strawberry workers in the town today, nearly half are from elsewhere.

In Li Chaodong’s strawberry farm now, the busiest season requires more than twenty workers, all women from elsewhere — “This is a hands-on job; men can’t do it as fast as women can.” He had people put up simple iron-sheet sheds, fitted with a washing machine, where the workers live day to day. They work eleven hours a day at ten yuan an hour, then pay ten yuan back for food and board. Sometimes they do not go home for months at a time.

For these migrant female workers, the pay at the strawberry farm is, of course, what draws them here to work. The decline of agriculture in their home villages is the force that pushes them away.

Inside one of the polytunnels at Li Chaodong’s strawberry farm, four women in their fifties and sixties are clearing weeds. Sitting on plastic buckets between the ridges, they work their way forward bit by bit, shifting the bucket along each time they finish a patch, and their hands keep moving even while they chat.

Two of them say their home villages used to grow green Sichuan peppercorn trees, but in recent years the price has dropped sharply, bringing in only two or three thousand yuan a year. This year, partly due to the climate, the harvest has fallen further still — “the trees have stopped fruiting” — which is what brought them to a strawberry farm not far from home: “It is just to make a bit of money; mainly there is no other work to be found out there.” Another woman’s home is at a higher altitude, where “you cannot even grow peppercorn,” so she contracted her land to someone else and came out to work.

For each of them, coming to the strawberry farm marks the first time they have left home to work. Their husbands and children are mostly away too, doing manual labour. Liu Yingcai, 60, tells me her son is “doing brute lifting — hauling soil for people, that sort of thing,” and her daughter-in-law has to take the grandchildren to school, so they all carry their own burdens. She can only “come out on her own to earn a living.” Her husband died over a decade ago, and there is no one keeping her rooted at home: “I just pull the gate shut, lock up, and come here to put something in my mouth.”

But some still have their eyes on the land back home. Another worker says she is here simply to “grind out a little money for fertiliser.” Once the boss pays this month’s wages, she may well head home, in time for the summer harvest, to pick the peppercorn on her own trees.

Once Inside the Polytunnel

Lu Yinghong is up at first light. By half past six she is at the strawberry farm, starting the day’s work. In the morning she sometimes picks strawberries, in which case she straps on a bamboo back-basket and walks back and forth inside the polytunnel, looking for fruit that has turned red. At twelve she takes her lunch break. Some workers take out the food they have brought, a potato or a packet of instant noodles, heat it up in the boss’s rice cooker, and eat right there at the edge of the field. Lu Yinghong lives close enough to ride her e-bike home. After she took up the farm work, her mother-in-law became responsible for preparing the midday meal.

Work resumes at one in the afternoon. The workers sit on stools between the ridges, pulling out weeds and yellowing leaves. In summer the polytunnel is often stifling, and the early afternoon is when drowsiness hits hardest. Lu Yinghong puts on her Bluetooth earphones and listens to music to stay alert. At five-thirty she clocks off, rides home, cooks for the whole extended family, and does the housework in her own household. She is busy until nine in the evening, when she picks up her eldest daughter from evening study, helps her with homework, then bathes and tucks both girls in.

From May this year, Lu Yinghong has been living to this schedule almost every day, with virtually no time off. When there is no work to be done in spring, she has been learning to drive, figuring it will make it easier to visit her parents’ home, and that later she can drive her daughter to and from school so the girls do not have to suffer the cold in winter. By the time she got her licence, it was already the busy strawberry season, so she went back to the farm.

Once the novelty wears off, Lu Yinghong feels the strain of the work more keenly. “It is rather hard on the back, and sometimes the legs hurt, too.” The fine fuzz on strawberry leaves works its way into the lungs and sets off coughing; in summer the polytunnel runs hot, and the older workers often feel dizzy. On top of the aching back and legs, there is the tedium — but “as long as I can earn a little, it does not matter.”

For the middle-aged and older workers, the physical toll shows even more clearly. The work in a strawberry farm means sitting for long stretches or bending over. By the end of a day, Chen Minglian always feels her lower back aching and her back sore. “My feet are all twisted and pulled, and they still hurt at night.” Because of this she sometimes needs a day off, but “there is no income coming in, so there is no other way — you just have to keep at it.”

The migrant female workers have even more hurdles to overcome. Liu Yingcai finds that “the food is not to my taste, nor is the living,” yet “what can you do if you are not used to it? Going out to work is all about making do.” Back home, growing peppercorn is hard work too, but at least when it gets hot or she is tired, she can stop and rest a while. Working for someone else is different: even if she is stripping leaves until her fingers ache, she cannot pause during working hours.

Work is busy and spread thin across the various strawberry farms. In Mashu, Liu Yingcai has gradually lost touch with the other women from her hometown who came to work; she has not even bumped into an acquaintance at the town market. After her shift she rests in the iron-sheet shed, waiting for dawn to start again the next day.

What You Can Escape, What You Cannot

Beyond the money, the strawberry farm also gives Lu Yinghong an emotional outlet. She can talk with the other women about the weather, the harvest, and the small business of family life. Sometimes she brings up her disagreements with her husband and his family, or the difficulties of looking after children, and the older women can offer a few words of comfort from their own experience. Before, on her own at home, she felt stifled; she and her old classmates no longer had anything in common to talk about, and gradually lost touch.

“So I feel that getting involved with strawberries is not just about having an income for me — it is also a sense of having another home,” Lu Yinghong says.

But not everyone feels the same way. The day of the interview, rain put a stop to work at Lu Yinghong’s farm in the afternoon, and the workers naturally lost their hourly pay for the lost time. She mentions an older woman who works alongside her: “She said it would have been nice if it had not rained, because she needs the money too. Her children have not married yet, and she is under quite a lot of pressure. Perhaps they do not really want to be out here either, but life leaves no other choice.”

Hard as the work is, the women still cannot save much. Chen Minglian says that compared with growing maize at four or five jiao a jin, she would far rather be at the strawberry farm. But prices are high these days: a trip from the village to the town market and back costs sixty yuan in fares just to buy a few things. She does not count on putting anything aside for retirement or medical care. “At this age, being able to keep yourself going is good enough.”

A worker from Laodian Town adds that, compared with life back in the village, living at the strawberry farm means extra spending on groceries and other purchases — “money does not last long.” On top of that, even though she is away working, the social obligations back home cannot simply be dropped. If a relative or friend is having a wedding or a funeral, she has to take time off and pay for a bus back. The fare alone is over a hundred yuan, and the gift money — “if it is less than one hundred, I would feel embarrassed to turn up” — is a considerable expense in its own right.

Most of what Lu Yinghong earns at the strawberry farm goes on her children — clothes, food, snacks, the younger daughter’s milk powder. “Even though I do not feel like I am spending any big money, and I am earning every day, there is never any money at the end of it.” The children’s expenses have always been her responsibility, once funded by the allowance her husband sent, now by what she earns herself.

This year the scrap-iron trade has been poor, and her husband has come home from Kunming to the village. He and her father-in-law are doing concrete pouring, and the financial pressure on the household has spiked. Her family, in turn, encourage her to keep working at the farm.

I ask her: now that there is two or three thousand more a month coming in, have her husband’s or her parents-in-law’s attitudes toward her changed because of it? The question rests on an assumption so unspoken in this part of the country that it hardly needs stating: a woman who has been eating and wearing what the in-laws provide, who has done the housework and raised two children, does not count as having contributed much.

“No.” Lu Yinghong’s answer is quick and flat. “I suppose I feel a little freer myself, and a little more affirmed of where I stand, but for everyone else there should be no real change. Because to other people, there are far more people who are more impressive than you — you do not count for much either.”

The Unknown Road Ahead

By the third year, the strawberry farm where Lu Yinghong had been working was losing people — the twenty-mu plot now had only eight or nine workers. When I reached out to Lu Yinghong again in July, she told me the boss had already transferred the land, and she had moved to a different strawberry farm.

In fact, this is a common pattern in the local strawberry industry. After three to five years, pathogens in the soil multiply, the fruit grows smaller and smaller, and the plants gradually die off. A joint study by the Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Beijing Academy of Agricultural Sciences explains: “The particular cultivation model in the Huize area leads to soil acidification, soil salinization, organic matter deficiency, and imbalance in soil microbial community structure, which in turn causes soil degradation and reduced strawberry yields.” After that, the operators either switch to a different plot or are left with no choice but to plant something else.

Much of Mashu’s strawberry industry originally came over from Huize. And if the land here is worked to exhaustion, the strawberry farms could well relocate elsewhere.

The bosses are all too well aware of this. Ma Guoguang says that as the soil degrades, the cost of pesticides and chemical fertilisers has risen sharply this year. On top of that, a mild winter has pushed yields down, so revenue is probably lower than last year. He reckons strawberries can be grown for at most five years. What do you turn to for income after that? What happens to the workers? Ma Guoguang has no answer.

Li Chaodong is struggling, too. He used to grow strawberries in Daibu Town, Huize, but eventually the “soil quality was no longer up to it,” and in 2021 he came to Mashu to lease land. He says he put in five to six hundred thousand yuan of his own and borrowed another five to six hundred thousand, and now he has “lost it all.” All he can do is wait until this year’s crop hits the market and see if he can recoup his costs.

“Of the million yuan you grind out, at most you keep a hundred thousand. The rest goes on wages, fertiliser, and land rent.” He says last year he paid 780,000 yuan in wages alone, which was sixty per cent of his costs. On top of that, because renting land requires going through a middleman, the expenses are enormous — the middleman leases waste land from the government at fifty yuan a mu and established fields at two hundred yuan a mu, but turns around and charges growers six hundred yuan a mu — “they are eating into ordinary people’s money, and it is we growers who take the losses.”

The soil degradation problem has resurfaced. This year he has tried growing sunflowers and pepino melons on a small scale, but neither has proved profitable.

The migrant female workers in the polytunnels are not aware of any of this. All they want is for the boss to sell the produce soon and pay their wages. In their view, across the entire county, there is nowhere else that would take in women like them — the “old, weak, sick, and disabled.”

Lu Yinghong feels much the same. “If the strawberry industry keeps going, I will probably keep going too. For me, right now, strawberries are really the only thing that suits me.” At half past six the next morning, she will once again step into the strawberry farm, walking in through the dawn glow or the mist.

– This is Foodthink’s 834th original article –

Except for Li Chaodong, all other people named in this article use pseudonyms.

Unless otherwise credited, all photographs are by the author.

Editor: Pei Dan

Layout: Xiaoshu

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