Leaving the City: Planting New Seeds of Life on the Farm
Foodthink Says
Scan the QR code in the poster to head straight to Foodthink’s WeChat Channels and register for the live stream. For further details, please see ‘Five Days to Go: Give Yourself a Reason to Try Farming’.
I. Wandering Through Life Before the Farm
After graduating with my bachelor’s degree in 2022, I bypassed the conventional career path and instead took a job at the “PDT Food Station” in Guangzhou. It is a non-profit organisation focused on food issues, and it was there I first encountered the concept of the “food system”. I came to understand the entire cycle of food: from production to consumption, and back into the fields again through means such as composting kitchen waste.
At the time, PDT’s work was largely focused on the consumer end, organising urban consumer education and partnering with restaurants on various projects. Yet I always felt that, in the context of everyday life, food production is far more marginal and invisible than consumption—a reality that drew me to it all the more.
Eager to try my hand at being a labourer, I left PDT to embark on a period of wandering. Along this journey, two farmers left a profound impression on me.
The first was a godmother I met in a Dong village.
I was then doing a work-exchange arrangement at a youth hostel in Kangding, pitching in at the front desk, in the kitchen, and with housekeeping. En route, I detoured back to Guandong Village in Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County, Guangxi. I had previously visited to collect oral histories, but this time I returned as both family and a participant in agricultural life. Catching the tail end of the autumn harvest, I joined them in gathering rice, picking tea leaves, and making Dong cloth.
Around that time, I tried making a documentary with my grandmother as the central subject. Having grown up in a rural area herself, I wanted to understand how she viewed the countryside, farming life, and the cities.
On one occasion, we wandered into a field of rapeseed blooms on the city’s outskirts. I was delighted by the sheer beauty of it. Watching my reaction, my grandmother remarked, “Do you realise? If you took all these rapeseed plants and pressed them for oil, they’d barely fetch a little over ten thousand yuan. You’d make far more money working away from home in a factory.” Once you factor in costs and labour, farmers are left with virtually nothing. What city dwellers romanticise as a picturesque sea of flowers, farmers see purely as backbreaking toil.
These two moments took root in my mind, leaving me with a lingering sense of confusion and shame.
Shortly after, I signed up for Foodthink’s “Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme”. Partly, I wanted to get to the bottom of what modern farming actually entails: what does it really mean to work the land? What is the day-to-day reality for farmers today? Could agriculture genuinely sustain a way of life?
It also served as an escape from my parents’ relentless pressure. Despite my long-standing desire to step outside the conventional life script, they still viewed my previous years as a period of “dithering” and lack of focus. I had begun applying for master’s degrees overseas, yet I found myself unsure why I actually wanted to study abroad. Following that academic path felt like it would simply steer me straight back into the very mainstream framework I was trying to escape.
So, heading off to a farm as an intern became my final attempt at carving out a different path.
II. What the Farm Is Like
Qiang, the manager of Guixinyuan, along with his fellow partners, embodies the “half-farmer, half-X” ethos. He works at a foreign company in Shenzhen during the week, visiting the farm only on weekends and holidays.
The first keyword associated with Guixinyuan is “permaculture”.
The farm’s layout follows permaculture design principles: Zone 0 is the homestead, while Zones 1, 2 and 3 are dedicated to agricultural production, becoming progressively closer to nature the further out you go. Zones 4 and 5 are reserved for plants and animals to grow and thrive freely—areas we deliberately visit only sparingly.
At the same time, the farm regularly hosts visitors for tours, accommodation, and meals, and collaborates with schools in Shenzhen on nature education projects, among other initiatives. Thanks to these diverse revenue streams, Guixinyuan reached a break-even point after just three years of operation. Ecological farms need to diversify their operations as much as possible, which is a key lesson I have learned.
III. Daily Life on the Farm
After that, I’d ask the two experienced farm workers to assign me the day’s tasks. Since the farm’s owner, Qiang, is rarely on site, they handle most of the day-to-day management, and the rest of us interns simply lend a hand.
Our most frequent jobs involve weeding and laying down mulch.
In these two images, the one on the left shows the sweet potato patch before weeding. The soil beneath the grass appears darker, indicating higher moisture levels. When the weeds are pulled up, the damp earth is disturbed along with the roots, bringing all that moisture to the surface. Once the sun bakes it dry, the ground becomes just as hard and compacted as the bare patches.
Having observed how grass protects the soil, I was left wondering whether weeding was actually the right approach.
I later learned that weeding is necessary at this stage because the sweet potato vines haven’t fully spread out, and the grass would otherwise compete with them. The weeds need to be cleared while they are still sparse and young. Once the sweet potato foliage has grown large enough, the grass can be left alone.
To prevent the soil from being left exposed, we use the pulled weeds as mulch. This not only keeps new weeds at bay but also helps retain moisture. As the vegetation breaks down, it forms humus that naturally enriches the soil.
Actually, Ajang and the others already knew plenty of ground-covering techniques.
Take weeding in the sugarcane fields, for example. He explained that we should lay the pulled weeds around the base of each sugarcane stalk, forming a ring. If you’re worried the weeds might take root again once placed back on the soil, you can lay the roots of one pulled weed over the leaves of the previous one. As long as the roots don’t touch the earth, the weeds won’t continue to grow.
Both farmers’ methods are grounded in practical experience, and differ quite a bit from my own notions of traditional or natural farming.
Later on, I developed a bit of a hobby for studying weeds on the farm. It turns out many of them are edible, and some even hold medicinal value. Sometimes when the dog followed us out to the fields, I’d notice it nibbling on different kinds of grass. Master Ajang told me that dogs are far cleverer than us. When we fall ill, we have to rush to the hospital; a dog will simply trot to the field edge, eat a few handfuls of grass, and heal itself.
● A few common wild plants we came across, listed in order: chamberbitter; carpet grass, which sends out creeping runners and soon covers the entire plot like a rug, making it notoriously difficult to pull up; beggarticks, which is also edible—crush a few leaves and apply them to a mosquito bite to relieve the itching; wild chrysanthemum greens, which grow abundantly near water’s edge, though Brother Qiang warned they’re toxic, so we avoided eating them; chickweed; and goatweed, which carries a refined, aromatic scent reminiscent of high-end Italian herbs. It’s said to be inedible for humans, yet geese and fish absolutely love it.
My partner, the intern Chenghao, is fascinated by insects. She’d often call me over to look at whatever new bug she’d found, but I never took much to it. We each have our own special interests.
On top of all that, we also carried out tasks like bagging the fruit, composting, sowing seeds, and so on.
IV. Gains for a Farming Novice
Mr Ajang often says, “Plants are much like people. Picture the root system as a network similar to human veins. If you imagine what a person needs, you’ll understand what a plant needs.” When it came to the finer details of watering and top-dressing, he couldn’t always offer a strictly scientific explanation. Yet he tended to them with precisely this mindset, guided almost entirely by intuition.
Weeds, too, play a role in this natural ecosystem. While tending the peanut patch, I noticed numerous small black insects resting on the weeds—these were shield bugs. They seemed to prefer the weeds; as long as the weeds were present, the bugs left the peanuts alone. Eventually, I decided to leave a patch of weeds specifically for them. In my view, how you manage weeds is a true reflection of your farming philosophy.
V. Connecting the Dots: From Seeing a Single Tree to Seeing the Forest
Ultimately, I realised: there is no single right way to practice ecological agriculture; it exists on a spectrum.
A farm can be judged by numerous metrics: its scale, the degree to which it embraces ‘ecological’ methods—does it use greenhouses? How much fertiliser is applied? How revenue is distributed across primary production, processing, and services, and so on. Every farm operates differently, but I believe that as long as there is a shared commitment to foundational principles—such as respecting nature and avoiding harm to human health and the environment—they all deserve to be called ecological.
When chatting with Liu at Xiaoliushu Farm, he divided farms into three categories: interest-driven, skill-based, and technology-focused. These frameworks provide a useful way to view the places I visited:
Interest-driven: whose interests does it cater to? It might be the farmer’s own passion, such as the vegetable patch maintained by Chen Yanhong. Alternatively, it might serve urban residents, like Phoenix Commune or Little Donkey, which divide land into small plots leased to city dwellers.
Skill-based: Out in the fields, Pengcheng showed us how to prune lychee and guava trees. Through simple pruning, he could shape the tree’s development and determine where the fruit would ripen. Such expertise isn’t confined to growing crops. Lvwo Farm, for example, turns produce into delicious biscuits, while Gan Juzheng crafts rice cakes and noodles from his own harvest.
Technology-focused: Yinlin Farm demonstrates outstanding management. Compost systems and greenhouse crop rotations are arranged with meticulous care, fostering a collaborative space for young workers. In Beijing, farms like Xiaoliushu incorporate agricultural machinery, while others, such as Xi Qing, excel in soil science and cultivation techniques.
Farming can be more than just a lifestyle; it is also a “way of thinking.”
As I travelled from farm to farm across Guangxi, I noticed that ecological farmers often possess a worldview distinct from that of city residents. It resonates more closely with the traditional Chinese ideal of harmony between humanity and nature, reflecting a mode of thought quite separate from modern society. Many also show a keen interest in traditional Chinese medicine, cultural heritage, and astronomy. Along the way, I met a wonderfully diverse array of people with varied perspectives—individuals you would scarcely encounter in an urban setting.
VI. The Future
For now, I likely lack all three. I have already acquired so much knowledge and seen a vast world, but perhaps I still wish to see an even broader one. I still harbour questions about the world around me, and perhaps the very process of seeking answers is also the process of discovering my “X”.
One could say this journey has already sown a seed within me. Whether I am studying, working, saving funds, or meeting new people in the days ahead, I hope to move steadily, step by step, toward this ideal. It will also become a new window through which I engage with the world, witnessing more and more farms. I hope this journal of notes can continue to be written, on and on.
