100 Days After the Disaster: A Beijing Farm’s Long Road to Recovery
In the three months following the disaster, everyone from anxious customers to government officials at every level has asked Zhen Rui the same question: “What happens next?”
In the early hours of 28 July 2025, extreme torrential rain battered the mountains of northern Beijing, as flash floods swept up silt and debris and breached the embankments. Along the banks of the Qingshui River in Beizhuang Town, Miyun District, the Sohu Farm managed by Zhen Rui was reduced to ruins overnight. Two local staff members narrowly escaped the darkness of the surging floodwaters.
The 450-mu plot represented thirteen years of hard work and passion for Zhen Rui, an agriculture student born in the 1980s. Since the autumn of 2012, Zhen Rui had cultivated sweet corn, fruit trees, and vegetables on the land, while managing small allotment gardens for over 100 members. He also welcomed visitors to the banks of the Qingshui River for camping and birdwatching. From late June to early October each year, batch after batch of corn ripened, going straight from the field to the table.
For more than three months, Zhen Rui has been clearing debris, assessing losses, and meeting with government officials, striving to find a way to rebuild the farm. Yet the future remains uncertain. How can he continue to farm? Where will the funds for reconstruction come from? And will such a disaster strike again?
His story is merely a microcosm of a larger crisis. Starting on 23 July, these anomalous and torrential rains swept across the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region for 147 hours, affecting 300,000 people and leaving 144 missing or dead, while destroying vast tracts of permanent basic farmland. As extreme weather events become more frequent and precipitation belts shift towards the north—where experience in flood prevention is limited—how are farmers to survive?
I. Reclaiming the Land?
Local government officials informed Zhen Rui that by the end of the year, during the annual national land change survey conducted by the natural resources department, the land’s status would be updated based on its actual use. If experts assessed and confirmed that the farm’s location could not be recultivated, it would be reclassified from “arable land” to “forest land” or “grassland”.
Policy documents jointly issued by the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, and the National Forestry and Grassland Administration indicate that to maintain the “farmland red line”, the area of arable land generally needs to maintain an “in-and-out balance”. However, land that is “difficult to recultivate due to natural disaster damage” can be exempt.
“Don’t force crops onto land that isn’t suitable. Leave it as it is, and once the classification is adjusted, we can see how to develop it for tourism,” the local town party secretary told Zhen Rui.
Having abandoned the idea of rebuilding on the original site, Zhen Rui began scouting the surrounding area. “We’ll huddle together for warmth and comfort one another,” he thought. A few weeks later, an idea began to take shape: business synergy.
Currently, he has reached a temporary cooperation agreement with another farm two kilometres away. That farm sits on higher ground and suffered less damage; it has 150 mu of high-standard farmland, newly built greenhouses, and a camping business. In those greenhouses, Zhen Rui has replanted his farm’s most signature product: fresh-eating corn. In exchange, he has referred his existing camping clients to the new farm.
On 24 September, the first batch of sweet corn sprouted from the new soil. Even though it remains uncertain whether these sprouts can survive the freezing winter of the Beijing suburban mountains over the next hundred days, they represent the closest thing to hope in Zhen Rui’s sight.
Yet, Zhen Rui is still reluctant to give up on the farm, because he feels a “sense of responsibility and emotional attachment”.
“Even if we can no longer farm here in the way we used to, it is still worthwhile if we can provide some warning or reference for those who come after us,” he said.
II. Funding
This flood wiped out at least 30 million yuan of the farm’s past investments. After the rain, the perimeter walls collapsed, and the site became open to all sorts of intruders. For a month, he and another local colleague worked hard in the mud to salvage metal warehouse frames, colour-steel door frames, and machinery wreckage, which they sold to scrap yards for a total of 30,000 yuan.
Following the disaster, the local government quickly required the farm to report data such as the planting area and expected yield of crops, as well as losses to agricultural and cultural tourism hardware. However, compensation standards have not yet been announced.
The town government also stated that it would provide a 50% subsidy for the funds needed to rebuild greenhouses and warehouses. “This was a natural disaster; the government truly has no obligation to ‘compensate’ us. We are grateful,” Zhen Rui said, “but the problem is, our operations have almost completely stopped. The total cost to build the greenhouses is 300,000 yuan—how are we supposed to find the remaining 150,000?”
The only certainty is that this flood was a “massive lesson”, Zhen Rui remarked.
For nearly 40 years of his life, Zhen Rui had lived almost entirely in the dry north, having “only seen floods on the news”. He was always the lucky one: in 2018, the rainy season was unusually long, making it difficult for the corn to pollinate and set seed; for 20 consecutive days, the farm had not a single ear of corn to sell. The water level of the nearby Qingshui River rose steadily, washing away a ford bridge near the farm’s small gate. Witnessing the bridge collapse, Zhen Rui realised for the first time that climate change seemed very close to home. But the weather soon cleared, and the crisis passed.
In 2023, extreme rainfall brought by a typhoon hit southern Beijing, leaving 33 dead and 18 missing. When some of his farming peers in Fangshan had their farms destroyed, Zhen Rui felt “somewhat relieved” to have escaped.
He did not expect that just two years later, extreme rainfall would hit Miyun. “I think I was a bit too complacent about the issue of climate change,” he said.
Zhen Rui had not taken out insurance for his crops or agricultural hardware. The reason was straightforward: if he had, the premiums could have reached tens of thousands of yuan per year, yet the payouts would be limited. In the past decade, the only time Zhen Rui considered purchasing agricultural insurance was after hail damaged the farm’s apricot trees the previous year. He learned that apricot tree insurance from Anhua Agricultural Insurance Company required a premium of over 1,000 yuan. In the end, he barely remembers whether he actually bought it or not.
Every year, he only purchases social security and accident insurance for his employees, and public liability insurance for guests participating in activities such as camping and birdwatching—the latter primarily covering personal injury and property damage caused by accidents on the premises.
Since 2007, the central and regional governments have begun providing premium subsidies for farmers purchasing agricultural insurance. This type of “policy-based agricultural insurance” covers crop cultivation, livestock farming, and agricultural property such as greenhouses and machinery.
In Beijing, for major crops like maize, wheat, and rice, the central government subsidises 35% of the premium, the municipal government provides a further 25% subsidy, meaning the farmer only needs to pay 40%.
Insurance payouts are generally determined by the coverage level, the growth stage of the crop at the time of damage, and the area destroyed. Using maize as an example, there are three levels of coverage: “planting insurance” (also known as “material insurance”), which covers basic planting costs such as seeds, fertiliser, pesticides, mechanical tilling, and irrigation; “full cost insurance”, which also includes land rent and labour costs; and “planting income insurance”, which is based on the expected income per mu of maize and covers the dual risks of yield reduction due to natural disasters and market price drops. The premiums increase accordingly.
Zhen Rui had previously been “unaware” of these details; his understanding of agricultural insurance was primarily centered on preventing “accidents”.
As of January 2024, government data from Fangshan District regarding the extreme rainfall of 2023 shows that a total of 18,900 mu of affected farmland received 16.2 million yuan in policy-based agricultural insurance payouts, averaging 857 yuan per mu. Additionally, 66,000 individual cases and 89 agricultural enterprises received 443 million yuan in government aid and subsidies.
Beijing’s policy-based agricultural insurance also includes agricultural property insurance, covering hardware such as machinery and greenhouses. Zhen Rui was unaware this type of insurance existed. “I thought about it later—what if I had bought it? But then I realised that making money in this industry is already incredibly difficult. I couldn’t justify spending tens of thousands of yuan every year on insurance for an event with such a low probability.”
III. The Cycle
This cycle began in the 1970s. The farm site was originally a riverbed; during the nationwide “Learn from Dazhai” movement to expand arable land, a layer of soil 30 to 40 centimetres thick was laid over the riverbed. By the 1980s, the movement was halted due to the environmental damage it caused.
“But the symbolism of it remained,” says Zhen Rui. “The drive to modify the environment to make it more suitable for production.”
In the autumn of 2012, another wave pushed Zhen Rui towards this land. As food safety scandals and smog frequently hit the headlines, many middle-class white-collar workers decided to “escape the city” and “return to the countryside”. Among them was Zhen Rui, who had recently graduated from the China Agricultural University and was working for a seed company.
“At the time, there were many voices questioning how we should live our lives in the future. Or to put it more extremely: how we should survive.”
When he first took over the farm, he spent time with a shovel, digging into many corners of the land. In many places, the soil was poor, with a limited capacity to retain water and nutrients.
Consequently, he spread cow manure, purchased cheaply from nearby livestock farms, covering the soil in heavy, black layers, “using it intensely, as if cost were no object.” To ensure a steady supply of fertiliser, the farm even raised over 3,000 chickens and a dozen pigs, until avian flu and swine fever eventually forced the closure of the livestock sheds.
Many of his fellow “middle-class migrants” eventually left the land, but Zhen Rui stayed. Day by day, the soil improved, and as its water-retention capacity grew, the frequency of irrigation decreased. Once-irregular plots were levelled into tiered fields, with different crops assigned to their own zones. Greenhouses sprang up. Roads were redesigned for easier vehicle access. To increase revenue through the integration of industry and tourism, the farm developed services such as birdwatching and camping.
It was only after this disaster that he began to rethink his past efforts. From riverbed to fertile land, and then back to the starting point overnight—was this a warning from nature?
“We perhaps need to seriously consider what it means to ‘adapt to local conditions’. Previously, everyone thought that because this place was closer to the village and more convenient for farming, it was ‘suitable’. Now, perhaps we must first consider the original form of the river channel and the trends of climate change before rethinking how the land is used.”
After thirteen years of farming, the same question—”how we should survive”—has resurfaced. This time, the answer depends on an erratic climate.
The unexpected has become the norm, and extreme weather has repeatedly defied existing knowledge, forcing farmers to relearn how to adapt to nature. On the other hand, the question of how systemic forces—such as land planning schemes, disaster relief capabilities, and insurance subsidy policies—can provide a safety net for rural areas facing disaster risks remains to be answered.
“If there is a next year, the maize must grow again. There will certainly be a next year, and the maize will bear witness to how nutrition comes from the silt, and how flowers bloom once more from the ruins.”
Zhen Rui wrote in a post on his public account on 8 August.
Unless otherwise stated, all images in the text were provided by the interviewee
Editor: Pei Dan