Bumper lychee harvest: why are they still expensive online?
I.Branches Laden with Lychees
My family home is in Lufeng, Guangdong Province, where we have a lychee grove of nearly one *mu*. They’ve been grown there for as long as I can remember; the youngest tree was planted the year I was born, making it thirty-one years old now.
In bumper years, once my parents sent some to the four of us siblings and gave some to relatives, there was basically nothing left. Last year was a lean year; there wasn’t much fruit, only enough for the family, and the two boxes they usually send me became a single small box. This year, however, is a bumper year—one of the biggest in decades—and the harvest is plentiful. So, my husband, An Tian, and I decided to head back and spend a few days as fruit farmers.
An Tian and I returned to the family orchard in late June. Although I had mentally prepared myself, it wasn’t until we arrived that I truly felt the scale of the harvest; some branches were bent double, and even the small side shoots on the trunks were laden with fruit. The lychees high up were already bright red, while those in the shade still had a hint of green.
Because our lychees are grown wild without fertilisers, they are smaller than conventionally grown fruit and don’t fetch a high price at the local markets. When the season first started, they sold for about 10 yuan per *jin* locally; my mother sold hers for 8 yuan just to move them quickly. Once the market was flooded, hardly anyone would buy ours even at 5.5 yuan per *jin*. For the customers, big and cheap is king; they couldn’t care less whether pesticides were used or not.
Furthermore, there are no centralised collection centres here like those in Maoming, making it difficult to contract to suppliers when volumes are small. To get a better price, the only option was to find a market online.
Fortunately, when we started our own farm in Longyan, Fujian, last October, we opened a Weidian shop to sell agricultural produce and gradually built WeChat groups to share our daily lives. So, two days before heading home, I mentioned the lychees in the WeChat group. Three or four friends placed orders almost immediately, meaning we could spend the first day busy with shipping.
An Tian took some photos of the lychees to use as product images for the shop and continued promoting them on Moments and in the WeChat groups. We didn’t know how many people would buy—we just figured every extra sale was a win—so we didn’t price them as organic, eventually settling on 54 yuan for 3 *jin* and 88 yuan for 5 *jin*.
When pricing, we looked at supermarkets in Fuzhou, where they were around 16 yuan per *jin*. Since An Tian and I had been working in Fuzhou before returning home, we figured our friends there were the most likely buyers. However, we underestimated the shipping costs and didn’t consider the difference between in-province and out-of-province delivery. It was for this reason that our first shipment turned into quite a struggle.
II. Shipping Costs More Than the Lychees
Being our first time shipping, the lack of experience made things a bit of a shambles. We had no cardboard boxes or styrofoam coolers—only trees full of lychees. Lychees are difficult to keep fresh; if no measures are taken after picking, the skins turn black and dry by the next day given the current temperatures, leading customers to complain or request refunds, thinking the fruit has spoiled. So, we decided on the spot to take them directly to the SF Express point for packaging, figuring they would have everything ready.
Conghua in Guangzhou, where we once interned at a farm, is one of China’s primary lychee-growing regions. Consequently, during harvest season, there are specialised SF Express service points there for shipping lychees, and the costs are relatively cheaper. But in our village, most growers are small-scale or independent, and there is only one ordinary SF service point. By the time we arrived, there was already a long queue, and there was only one member of staff. He was so busy he had no time to answer questions; the scene was quite chaotic.
While I was asking about styrofoam boxes, a lady from the shop next door chimed in: “We sell styrofoam boxes here too! Which size do you need?” With so many farmers shipping fruit these days, her boxes and ice packs had been selling like hotcakes.
Once packed and ready to send, the courier gave us stickers to label the orders so he could keep processing others. An Tian was in charge of scanning and placing the orders, and he said, sounding shocked: “It’s 36 to send to Fuzhou!”
“We sell them for 54, and the shipping is 36—and that’s for the express service,” An Tian muttered, doing the maths. Because we were busy packing and everything was so hectic, his thinking was a bit clouded; he mistakenly thought the 5 *jin* package we were sending was only 3 *jin*.
My head was spinning too; there were so many people, and my mother was waiting beside me. She couldn’t understand why we were taking so long to place the order, as she doesn’t understand Mandarin. My mind was a whirl, but I couldn’t think of any other way. Even if we didn’t make any money, we just had to get them sent.
On the way back, my head cleared slightly and I realised we were actually sending 5 *jin* packages. At a selling price of 88 yuan, with shipping to Fujian at 36 and the ice pack and box totalling 5, we would still clear 47 yuan. However, shipping to further locations would be even more expensive; for example, sending a 5 *jin* package to Shandong via express cost 54 yuan. In such cases, the courier and packaging costs would account for roughly two-thirds of the revenue from a single order.
At the time, we had over a dozen orders on our online shop, coming from Sichuan, Shandong and Fujian. With no solution for the shipping costs, we spent that evening splitting our product links into two pricing tiers: in-province and out-of-province. The in-province price remained at 54 yuan for 3 jin and 88 yuan for 5 jin, while the out-of-province price was raised to 68 yuan for 3 jin and 108 yuan for 5 jin.
Many customers couldn’t understand why lychees remained so expensive despite this year’s bumper crop, but once you calculate the shipping costs from a farmer’s perspective, the answer becomes clear.
Later, we switched to JD for our deliveries. Although the base shipping rates were similar to SF Express, JD offered numerous coupons, making it slightly cheaper overall. In the end, we did the maths: we sold 51 parcels, earning 4,503 yuan, with shipping and packaging costing 1,526 yuan. Shipping and packaging ultimately accounted for roughly a third of our total revenue—and that was without including the labour costs for picking, sorting and packing.
III. Farmers Racing Against Time
This was precisely what I feared most about using couriers. Looking at the trees laden with fruit, An Tian wanted to sell as many as possible as quickly as he could. But for me, the quantity sold wasn’t the most important thing; I was far more worried that customers would receive rotten fruit. I grew up eating delicious lychees, and I didn’t want them to turn into mush by the time they reached someone else. I wanted them to taste lychees just as wonderful as the ones I’d known.
To keep lychees fresh, we as farmers must race against the clock during the picking and packing stages. Lychees should be picked when it is coolest to maintain a lower temperature and preserve freshness, which is why we head to the orchard at the crack of dawn every day. The fruit must also be completely dry when picked, otherwise, they rot easily when trapped in polystyrene boxes. I remember one night it rained heavily; hearing the downpour in the middle of the night, I had a bad feeling. When I arrived at the orchard at six the next morning, the lychees were still dripping wet. Our entire plan was thrown into chaos, and we had to wait for the sun to come out and the fruit to dry before we could pick them.
The packing process after picking is also a real test of speed. On average, An Tian and I could pack twenty boxes a day. We would start picking at seven in the morning and return around ten. Then came the sorting: we had to pick out any with insect holes or those that didn’t look quite right, and trim the leaves—removing some, but keeping enough to maintain freshness. By midday, we would have sorted more than half. After lunch, we continued, visually inspecting almost every single lychee before it went into a box, which was quite time-consuming. If we finished packing and delivered them to the main courier hub by 3 pm, the lychees could catch the earliest transport out.
A few days passed in a blur. After we returned to Longyan, Fujian, Guangdong was hit by several more bouts of rain. I imagined that in every lychee grove across that land, there were likely farmers just like us, weaving through the green and red fruit, doing everything they could to beat the clock. I thought back to the first day of shipping and the anxious look on my mother’s face as she waited. Shipping is indeed expensive, but there is little we can do to change that. All we can do is race against time to keep the lychees fresh before they are sent off; as small-scale farmers, that is the extent of our power.
Photography: All photos by the author unless otherwise noted
Editor: Yu Yang