10 Yuan an Hour: A Yunnan Strawberry Worker’s Fallback and ‘Freedom’

June on the plateau, and a rainstorm has just passed. The wind rolls down from the ridge, a bone-chilling cold carrying the smell of turned earth and the scent of strawberry leaves. Looking out across the distance, rows of white greenhouses stretch between lush green mounds of hills, like silkworms resting on mulberry leaves.

This is Mashu Town, Qiaojia County, Zhaotong City, Yunnan Province. High altitude, low temperatures, large day-night temperature swings in the mountains, and terrain that is flatter and more open than the surrounding area — it is these natural conditions that have made Mashu the country’s second-largest summer strawberry-growing base. In 2025, the official planted area across the town reached 25,000 mu, providing work for over 9,000 people.

Strawberry cultivation is a quintessentially labour-intensive form of agriculture. The delicate fruits are tucked among the leaves, and the slightest carelessness can bruise them. Every stage of the process demands hands-on work. Step into a greenhouse and the figures bent over between the rows are almost entirely women.

In May this year, two traffic accidents involving rural female workers occurred in quick succession. In Dandong, Liaoning, a minibus full of blueberry pickers overturned, killing eight and injuring thirteen. In Hechi, Guangxi, a pickup truck carrying sweet potato workers plunged into the water, and ten people lost their lives. The women who pick fruit in large-scale farms, and the toil and risk they bear, have gradually entered public view.

The strawberry workers in Mashu Town belong to this same group. Some are in their fifties or sixties, making the most of what strength they have left to earn enough for food and a retirement fund. Others are local left-behind mothers, striving to balance caring for their families with independent work. In the strawberry fields, they work ten to eleven hours a day—pressing the runners, weeding, picking fruit—trading their mud-caked hands for wages of around a hundred yuan.

For these rural women, the strawberry industry offers a chance to step outside the home and earn on their own without having to travel far. And yet they still occupy the ‘lowest rung’ of the industry. As rural areas undergo transformation—small-scale farming crumbling, men leaving to work elsewhere—these women, whether lacking education and skills or shouldering the burden of family care, were once passive fixtures on the land. The strawberry fields have given them a fallback for making a living. But can this fallback lead, in some measure, to freedom?

A Left-Behind Mother’s Decision

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

The strawberry industry in Mashu, the town where her husband’s family is from, began about ten years ago. At the time, most of those leasing the land were outsiders who had growing experience in places such as Daibu Town in neighbouring Huize County and had since come to Mashu, where the geography and climate are similar. The land near the town centre was first cleared of its maize and potato crops, and greenhouses were put up.

In the years that followed, 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, one of the plots right behind Lu Yinghong’s house. The village’s middle-aged and older women were hired to do the work — ten hours a day, ten or eleven yuan an hour, with work available for roughly five or six months a year. The pay was modest, but it was better than farming at home.

Lu Yinghong saw it, and felt drawn in. But her eldest daughter was only three at the time, still needing care, 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 stepped into the greenhouse.

“I always wanted to stand at the chalkboard, but instead I find myself trapped in a strawberry field that covers several dozen mu.” Lu Yinghong is young and educated; among the women working in the strawberry farms, she stands out. Half a year after entering the greenhouse, she posted this on WeChat Moments.

She was born in a mountain village in Chongxi, a neighbouring township, where the hills are steeper and life is harder. As a child, she was a left-behind child — her grandparents could look after her food and clothing but paid little attention to her schooling or social life. She says she used to be a good student, particularly strong in Chinese, but her grades slipped and no one stepped in to help, so she started to give up on herself.

Even so, after finishing secondary school, Lu Yinghong managed to get into a vocational college in the county seat, studying early childhood education — the gross enrolment rate for senior secondary school in Qiaojia County that year was only 42 per cent. But like many girls from mountain villages, she met a boyfriend in the county town. When his training as a militia member ended, she decided to drop out and go to Fujian with him to work. Her parents did not object. Their position was simple: “If you choose not to study, what kind of life you lead afterwards has nothing to do with us.”

She worked in Fujian for only three months. After that, the two of them went back to his hometown, married, and had a child. That year, Lu Yinghong was barely twenty.

In the seven years after her marriage, Lu Yinghong describes herself as “80 per cent of the time, a left-behind woman” — her husband first worked in a factory, then tried his hand at the scrap iron trade in Anhui and Kunming. She lived with her in-laws, doing the laundry, cooking, and looking after the children at home. Farm work was never far away either: she fed the chickens and pigs, and during harvest she helped her mother-in-law dig potatoes. “I was on the go from morning till night.”

In Mashu she knew no one — no relatives, no friends — and lived entirely within the small circle of her household. Friction with her in-laws was inevitable, and the separation from her husband brought arguments of its own. “Some things never get resolved. Every time I bring them up and go over them with him again, but he never really changes.”

From the husband’s family’s perspective, however, Lu Yinghong’s life was already “happy” enough. Mashu’s natural conditions were better than her own family’s village; her father-in-law did concrete pouring work across the townships, which counted as a decent income locally. Her husband was honest and quiet — when tensions arose, he never raised his hand or shouted. While working away, he sent money home every month, and they had built a new house with tiled floors. In their eyes, Lu Yinghong was simply being “unreasonable.”

In a life like this, negative emotions surfaced. “I keep denying myself — I feel like I can’t look after the children properly, I can’t do the housework properly, I can’t do the farm work properly.” Sometimes she felt lost: “If I hadn’t been so willful back then and had studied properly, would things be different now?”

Lu Yinghong was not without having tried to make changes. Watching other couples work side by side, she had thought about going out to work with her husband — to strengthen their bond and improve their finances. But the thought that their children might become left-behind children in turn, repeating what she had experienced as a child, made her abandon the idea.

Around the time of her second daughter’s birth, she needed to make frequent trips to the hospital in the county seat, and tensions with her in-laws made staying home untenable. She asked her husband if she could rent a place in the county town with the children and enrol her eldest in a kindergarten there. He agreed, albeit reluctantly, and sent her money each month. Although she was looking after her eldest daughter, recovering from childbirth, feeding the baby and cooking, she found that period “a little easier” — she only had to look after the children, without also juggling farm work and household chores. But after just a year and a half, her husband’s income became unstable, and asking him for rent and living expenses grew difficult.

Under the pressure of finances, she and her daughters went back to the village, to live with her in-laws again.

Working in the strawberry farms gave Lu Yinghong a path that let her be with her children and also step outside the home — in the past, in a county town with little industry, even hot pot restaurants and snack stalls were unwilling to hire mothers who needed to look after children as waitresses. The strawberry farm was just a ten-minute walk from home, and for the first time, she could earn her own money.

When she first arrived at the strawberry farm in the first lunar month, Lu Yinghong was on edge. Since leaving school, she had done no more than five or six odd jobs — factory work in Fujian, paving roads around the village — none of them for long. She was afraid she would do it wrong and be picked on by the boss. Even with a relative showing her how, she kept asking, ‘Is this how it’s done?’ Before long, she had learned to pull out the old strawberry leaves.

The job lasted only eighteen days and brought in two thousand yuan. After the winter maintenance at the strawberry farm ended, there would be no work again until close to summer. But when she got paid, Lu Yinghong had ‘affirmed herself for one minute.’ ‘I just felt that I could make it on my own — as long as I was willing to take the first step, there was nothing I couldn’t do.’

She recalled the days two years earlier, when she had been alone in the county town with her children. Her youngest was only four months old. Once, both children fell ill at the same time, and she had to look after them while they received IV drips at the hospital. ‘I felt like I was falling apart. It didn’t matter whether I had family or a husband — all I had was money that could give me a sense of security. And money is exactly what I lacked most.’

The fallback work, left to women

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

Why are most of the workers women? Lu Yinghong told me that on the one hand, younger men can choose to go to other provinces for work and earn more; on the other hand, there are gendered assumptions at play. ‘Some men might have grandiose ambitions and think the pay is too low. They also feel that this kind of work is a little undignified… because they think growing strawberries is something women do, and if a man does it, people will laugh at him and he’ll lose face.’

Women are the backbone of strawberry cultivation, but they are rarely the managers or lessees of the farms. Many of the older women locally are illiterate. What they do is repetitive, hard work with little in the way of technical skill.

At another strawberry farm in Caopidi Village, the operator Ma Guoguang told me he was a villager from the same village. A few years earlier, he and his wife had been growing greenhouse vegetables in Luliang County, Qujing. But when vegetable prices slumped, they made no profit, and three years ago they returned home. With a fifteen-thousand-yuan agricultural loan, he and a relative cleared the land for this strawberry farm. Between their own land and what they leased, there were a dozen-odd 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 older women from the village. He says the work at a strawberry farm requires patience and a light touch, and women do it better than men.

Chen Minglian is one of them. One of her two daughters married into the same village and has a child just over two years old; the other married into a neighbouring county, and where her son-in-law is working, nobody knows. ‘They have their own burdens to bear — to be honest, they can barely make ends meet,’ she says. She doesn’t expect 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 his parents.

Now fifty-six, her hair is already streaked grey and her face is mapped with deep lines. At the time of the interview, she was wearing an apron, the pocket at the front stuffed with small red plastic forks, propagating runners. She bent down, tore an opening in the mulch film beside an existing plant, drew out a sprawling strawberry runner, and used a small fork to secure it in the soil at the gap — the most effective way to propagate strawberry plants. Once the runner’s roots have taken hold, the connection to the mother plant is cut back. The same motion, Chen Minglian repeats hundreds of times a day.

The technical work, though, is still left to the ‘bosses.’ While Chen Minglian was training the vines, Ma Guoguang was about to spread fertiliser across the field. He said that work like this was always done by him and his relative who was in partnership with him — it would never be given to the workers.

The “Pushed” Outsiders

As the strawberry industry expanded, a labour shortage gradually emerged. Many strawberry farms, particularly those taken over on a large scale by non-local operators, began recruiting workers from neighbouring towns and townships.

Li Chaodong is from Huize County, Qujing. He has contracted around 50 mu of land in each of Mashu Town and the neighbouring Laodian Town to grow strawberries. By his estimate, local labour had already run short four or five years ago. Today, of the seven or eight thousand strawberry workers in the town, nearly half come from outside the area.

Now, at Li Chaodong’s strawberry farm, the busiest season requires over twenty workers, all migrant women — “This is skilled handwork; men aren’t as quick at it as women.” He had a simple corrugated-iron shelter built, fitted with a washing machine, where the workers live. They work eleven hours a day at ten yuan an hour, with ten yuan deducted for food and lodging. Sometimes they don’t go home for months.

For these out-of-town women, the wages at the strawberry farm are, of course, what pulls them here. The decline of agriculture in their home areas, meanwhile, is the force that has pushed them away.

Inside one of the greenhouses at Li Chaodong’s strawberry farm, four women in their fifties and sixties are pulling weeds. Perched on plastic buckets between the ridges, they nudge the bucket forward a few steps after clearing each patch, their hands never stopping even as they chat.

Two of them said their home villages used to grow green Sichuan pepper, but pepper prices have plummeted in recent years, netting them no more than two or three thousand yuan a year. The climate this year has cut yields even further — ‘they don’t even bear fruit’ — which is why they ended up at a strawberry farm not far from home. ‘It’s just to earn a little money. The main thing is there’s no other work to be found out there.’ Another woman comes from a higher-altitude village where ‘you can’t even grow pepper,’ so she let someone else take over her land and came out to work.

For all of them, coming to the strawberry farm is the first time they have left home to work. Their husbands and children are mostly out working elsewhere as well, in physical jobs. Liu Yingcai, 60, told me her son is ‘doing brute work, hauling earth for people and such,’ and her daughter-in-law has to take the grandchild to school, so everyone is stretched thin. She can only ‘come out on her own to make a living.’ Her husband has been dead for over a decade, and she has no one keeping her tied down: ‘I just shut the front door, lock it, and come here to scrape by.’

But some still have their eyes on the land back home. Another worker said she came here just to ‘grind out a bit of money for fertiliser.’ Once the boss pays this month’s wages, she may well go back in time for the summer harvest, to pick the pepper at home.

After entering the greenhouse

When the sky is just beginning to lighten, Lu Yinghong is up. By half past six she arrives at the strawberry farm to start the day’s work. In the morning, if there is picking to do, she slings on a bamboo back basket and walks back and forth through the greenhouse, looking for fruit that has turned red. At twelve the lunch break begins. Some workers bring out the food, potatoes, or instant noodles they have packed and heat them in the boss’s rice cooker, eating right there on the field. Lu Yinghong lives close enough to ride her e-scooter home for lunch. Since she took up this work, her mother-in-law has been handling the midday meal.

Work resumes at one in the afternoon. The workers sit on stools between the rows, pulling weeds and stripping yellow leaves. The greenhouse can be stiflingly hot in summer, and the post-lunch hours are when drowsiness hits hardest, so Lu Yinghong puts on her Bluetooth earbuds and listens to music to keep herself alert. She clocks off at half past five. Back home, she cooks for the whole family and does the housework for her own household. It is busy until nine in the evening, when she collects her eldest daughter from self-study, helps her with homework, then gets both children washed up and to bed.

Since May this year, Lu Yinghong has lived almost entirely by this schedule, with barely any time off. When there is no work in spring, she took driving lessons, thinking it would make it easier to visit her parents’ home, and that she could later drive her daughters to and from school so they would not have to suffer the cold in winter. By the time she got her licence, the busy season for strawberry planting had begun, and she was back at the berry farm.

As the novelty wore off, Lu Yinghong came to feel the physical toll of the work more keenly. “It’s hard on the back, and sometimes the legs ache too.” The fine hairs on strawberry leaves can be inhaled into the lungs, bringing on a cough; in summer the greenhouses grow hot, and older workers often feel dizzy. On top of that, the back aches, the legs hurt, and the work is monotonous, but “if you can earn a little money, you just make do.”

For the older workers, the physical toll is even more pronounced. Work in the strawberry farm requires long periods of sitting or bending over. At the end of a day, Chen Minglian always feels her lower back sore and her back aching — “the feet twist and pull all day, and they ache at night, too.” Because of this, she sometimes needs to rest, but “there’s no income, is there? You have no choice but to keep going.”

Women who come from elsewhere face even more difficulties. Liu Yingcai “is not used to the food, not used to the accommodation,” but “what are you going to do? Working away from home means making do.” Meanwhile, growing Sichuan pepper at home is hard work too, but when it gets hot or tiring, at least she can take a break on her own; working for someone else, even if picking leaves aches her fingers, she cannot stop during working hours.

Work is spread across the different strawberry farms. In Mashu, Liu Yingcai has gradually lost touch with the other women from her home village who came to work here, and she has not come across anyone she recognises at the market in town. After finishing her shift, she rests in a tin-roofed room and waits for dawn to break so she can start again the next day.

What you can escape from, and what you cannot

Beyond the money, the strawberry farm has also given Lu Yinghong an emotional outlet. She can talk with the other women about the weather, the harvest, and the small affairs of family life. Sometimes she pours out the tensions between herself and her husband, or her difficulties with her in-laws, or the struggles of raising children, and the older women can always offer a few words of counsel drawn from their own experience. Before, when she was home alone, she felt stifled. She and her old schoolmates no longer had anything in common to talk about, and gradually lost touch.

“So I feel that working with strawberries has given me more than just an income — it has also given me a sense of having a home,” Lu Yinghong says.

But not everyone feels the same way. On the day of the interview, rain meant the strawberry farm where Lu Yinghong works closed in the afternoon, and the workers naturally lost their hourly pay for those hours. She mentioned a woman who works with her — “She said it would be better if it didn’t rain, because she needs the money too. Her children haven’t married yet, and the pressure is considerable. Maybe they don’t want to come, but to make a living, what else can they do?”

Even with all that hard work, the female workers can’t save much. Chen Minglian says that compared to growing maize at four or five jiao a jin, she would of course rather work at the strawberry farm. But prices are high — a round trip from the village to town to do some shopping costs 60 yuan in transport alone, and she doesn’t expect to save for old age or medical care. “At this age, if you can just make ends meet, that’s good enough.”

A female worker from Laodian Town puts it differently: compared to life back in her village, living at the strawberry farm means extra spending on groceries and other necessities — “money doesn’t last.” Moreover, even though she’s working away from home, the social obligations back home can’t be ignored. If a relative or friend has a wedding or funeral, she has to take time off and travel home. The fare runs into hundreds of yuan, and the gift money — “less than 100 yuan and it would be embarrassing to show up” — is no small expense either.

Lu Yinghong’s earnings at the strawberry farm go mostly to her children — clothes, food, snacks, formula for her youngest daughter. “Although it feels like I haven’t spent much, and I’m earning every day, I still have no money every day.” She has always been the one covering the children’s expenses; previously it came from her husband’s allowance, now it’s her own earnings.

This year the scrap iron trade has been poor, and her husband has returned from Kunming to their hometown to work alongside her father-in-law on concrete pouring. The financial pressure has spiked. So her family has encouraged her to carry on.

I asked her whether the extra two or three thousand yuan a month had changed how her husband and in-laws treated her. The question rests on an assumption taken for granted locally: a woman who once ate at her in-laws’ table and wore their clothes is considered to have contributed nothing, even if she did the housework and raised two children.

“No,” Lu Yinghong answered, without hesitation. “Perhaps I feel a little freer myself, and a bit more confident in who I am, but for everyone else there’s probably no change. Because to other people, there are far more who outshine you — you don’t amount to much either.”

An Unknown Road Ahead

By the third year, the strawberry farm where Lu Yinghong originally worked had seen its workforce shrink. The 20 mu of land now has only eight or nine workers. In July, when I reached out to Lu Yinghong again, she said the boss had already transferred the land, and she had moved to a different strawberry farm.

In fact, this is the common pattern across the local strawberry industry. After three to five years of cultivation, pathogens build up in the soil, the fruit grows smaller, and the plants gradually wither. 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, salinization, organic matter depletion, and an imbalance in the soil microbial community, resulting in soil degradation and reduced strawberry yields.” After that, operators either move to new land or switch to growing something else.

Much of Mashi’s strawberry industry came originally from Huize. And if the land here is exhausted, the strawberry farms may well move on to somewhere else.

The bosses are well aware of this. Ma Guoguang says that as the soil degrades, this year’s costs for pesticides and fertiliser have risen sharply. Add the effect of a mild winter, and yields have dropped — returns are probably not as good as last year. He estimates that strawberries can be grown for at most five years. What will people do to earn a living after that, and what will happen to the workers? Ma Guoguang has no answer.

Li Chaodong is no less troubled. He originally grew strawberries in Daibu Town, Huize, but when the “soil was no longer up to it,” he came to Mashi in 2021 to lease land. He says he invested 500,000 to 600,000 yuan and borrowed another 500,000 to 600,000 yuan, and now “it’s all gone” — all he can do is wait for this year’s crop to reach the market and see if he can break even.

“Of the million you work yourself to earn, at most 100,000 is left. The rest all goes to wages, fertiliser, land rent.” He says last year’s wages alone came to 780,000 yuan, accounting for sixty per cent of costs. On top of that, because leasing land requires going through middlemen, the overheads are enormous — the middleman leases wasteland from the government at 50 yuan a mu, cultivated land at 200 yuan a mu, but resells it to growers at 600 yuan a mu. “They’re taking money out of our pockets; the ones who lose out are us, the growers.”

The soil degradation problem has resurfaced. This year he tried small-scale cultivation of sunflowers and pepino, but neither has shown any return.

The migrant female workers in the greenhouses have no idea about any of this. All they hope for is that the boss sells the produce soon and pays their wages soon. As far as they can see, across the entire county, apart from the strawberry industry, there is nowhere else that can take them in — these old, weak, sick, and disabled women.

Lu Yinghong feels much the same. “If strawberries keep going, I suppose I’ll keep going too. For me, right now, strawberries are the only thing that suits me.” The next morning at six thirty, she will step into the strawberry farm once more, through the dawn glow or the mist.

– This is Foodthink’s 834 th original article –

With the exception of Li Chaodong, all individuals named in this article are using pseudonyms.

Unless otherwise credited, all photographs were taken by the author.

Edited by Pei Dan

Layout by Xiaoshu

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