A decade of farming: personally growing every single thing I want to eat
Editor’s Note
I. In Search of the Perfect Rice
When I cook, I use the rice Chen Ying grows with compost as a base, mixed with other whole grains, seeds, or nuts. This makes the rice nutritionally rich and complex in texture; it is naturally fragrant, sweet, and satisfying.
In moments like these, I feel deeply grateful to Chen Ying for growing our rice. Every month, via the Chengdu Life Market, I arrange for her to bring 5kg (10 jin) of rice from Meishan.
I met Chen Ying several years ago.
Having worked in the food industry early in my career, I have always been wary of food from untraceable sources. After having a child, my need for ‘clean’ food naturally became even more urgent. They say ‘you are what you eat’; the number of meals we eat in a lifetime is finite, and food shapes us over time. As the person primarily responsible for my child’s nutrition, I wanted them to have a healthy body. Consequently, my immediate priority was to find a rice supplier I could truly trust.
Rice is so fundamental that in her new book, *Jun Xing Shi (The Joy of Eating)*, Fuxia devotes a section specifically to white rice. In that piece, she references the American anthropologist Sidney Mintz: ‘Rice is the “core” of the Chinese diet, while the dishes (or those that accompany the rice) are the “peripherals”.’ I couldn’t agree more, as my mother always taught me: ‘To stay healthy, eat your fill for all three meals’.
To find the right rice, my family and I visited several organic farms before meeting Chen Ying. From Moganshan to Xinjin, and then to Chongzhou and Dujiangyan, we found that none were quite right:
The average price of rice from several large organic farms around Chengdu was 25 yuan per jin, which was beyond our budget. The rice from Moganshan was 15 yuan per jin, but the distance was too great. This not only clashed with the principle of local ecological cycles and community mutual aid—eating food grown within 100km—but also needlessly increased carbon emissions and created more courier and packaging waste.
When I heard of someone named Chen Ying growing rice in Meishan, I was thrilled. I reached out to her immediately and somewhat presumptuously, hoping to visit her farm and see exactly how she grew her rice.
Since then, all our rice has come from Chen Ying. Occasionally, she includes some rice bran, which we use to feed poultry at the nature school or provide to the children at the camp for composting after they’ve washed the dishes.
Beyond the attractive price, I chose Chen Ying’s rice because of what I saw at her farm. Around that time, a friend who ran a bookstore in Xi’an happened to send me a copy of *The Life of Farming and Eating*. I didn’t expect that in my search for rice, I would find Chen Ying and witness a real-life Sichuan version of that self-sufficient lifestyle. Amidst my admiration and respect, I felt a wave of relief—from then on, I no longer had to worry about where our rice came from.
II. Chen Ying: Growing Whatever You Wish to Eat
She is truly just like Yumiko Hayakawa, the author of *The Life of Farming and Eating*. In Shifuo Township, Meishan, she lives a life ‘not centred on her own time, but on the rhythm of the plants’. After nearly ten years of farming and eating, Chen Ying’s achievement can be summed up in one sentence: ‘The only food I need to buy is salt.’
Watching Chen Ying farm over the years, I often feel that the most magical thing about nature is how it allows a person to drift freely and return to a state of innocence.
One moment, she is searching for ox horns to create biodynamic preparations, practising ‘biodynamic farming’ on the farm according to the phases of the moon;
Another moment, she is planting cotton, hoping to make her own quilts and clothes after the harvest;
Then, she decides that the bread oven at Le Mao’s place is a wonderful idea, so she builds one on her farm and brings the baked bread to the market to sell;
Then again, she buys a home dehydrator to turn various fruits—those too delicate to transport or sell fresh—into dried fruit, making them easier to preserve and share with others;
…
Chen Ying approached her farm with the experimental spirit of a child playing house, keen to try her hand at everything. During the off-season, she travelled with partners from non-profit organisations to study various methods, learning from the best of each. The first ten years of her return to the land seemed to pass in the blink of an eye.
Yet, in that blink of an eye, she had already fulfilled the wish she made to herself in her youth: to grow every single thing she wanted to eat with her own two hands.
III. Turning Waste into Treasure: Rice-Duck Rice
Meishan is known as the ‘Tianfu Granary’. In the conventional approach, relying on pesticides, chemical fertilisers, and herbicides to grow rice is standard practice for local farmers. Chen Ying, however, chose to challenge this with ecological agriculture—a path that required immense dedication and painstaking effort. Her original twenty-some acres were already enough to keep her busy, yet she expanded the farm to forty. Her motivation was surprisingly simple: to reduce the interference from the pesticides and fertilisers used in the ‘conventional’ methods of other villagers on her own self-sufficient little sanctuary. Thus, she paid more in rent every year, committing to a long-term project of ecological restoration.
To grow high-quality rice without chemical fertilisers, pesticides, or herbicides, Chen Ying enlisted an army of ducks for pest control and hired a worker to help her make compost.
Composting is the farm’s primary task outside of cultivation. Dead branches and leaves from the osmanthus forest in the buffer zone, droppings from free-range poultry, vines, leaves, roots, and peels from vegetables and fruits, and various kitchen scraps—all were collected by her to ‘turn waste into treasure’. Consequently, checking on the compost became her daily ritual.
Every spring, before sowing seedlings, Chen Ying crushes rapeseed stalks and returns them to the field as fertiliser. Once the seedlings emerge, they are transplanted by hand. After the water is drained from the paddies, the ducks are sent in to ‘work’ for about six months, with additional fertiliser applied according to the rice’s growth. When the grain is ready for harvest and milling into new rice, the pest-controlling army of ducks, having completed their term of service, are prepared as sweet-skin duck. Her once-a-year homemade sweet-skin duck became something I looked forward to in early autumn.
IV. Encountering “Farming and Eating Life”
I often joke, “It’s not that Chen Ying owns Meet Family Farm, but that Meet Family Farm owns Chen Ying.”
For this reason, it was only fitting that I took participants to talk with Chen Ying for the latest ‘I Want to Know My Food’ reading group, where we studied *Farming and Eating Life*.
This exchange sparked a reflection in one of the fellow readers who joined us. We have known each other for years; she runs an art studio and often dreams of retiring to the countryside after fifty. After visiting Chen Ying’s home, she realised she still had a great deal of preparation to do.
She saw the conditions that allowed Chen Ying to retire early in her forties and explore a second life: besides starting work early, she had children early, her husband has a job in the city, and the family owns an old house and land in the village. With all these conditions aligned, she was able to ‘play house’ without any burden during the prime of her life.
Chen Ying is undoubtedly lucky, but this luck did not fall from the sky. It is because she never forgot the ideal in her heart and put in consistent, practical effort, finally receiving her ‘sweet reward’.
V. Everyone can have “grain in the house and peace in the heart”
Slices of slightly wilted carrots were stir-fried with Spicy Chicken sent by Ms Jiang’s mother; the carrots, having soaked up the oil, tasted better than the chicken. Fresh, tender carrots were boiled whole with purple potatoes and purple cauliflower, then chopped into a ‘Purple-Purple Salad’—a bowl full of anthocyanins.
Finer carrots were diced and stir-fried with peas and minced meat into a tri-coloured dish, with a touch of homemade chilli sauce from a friend’s mother added just before serving—perfect for eating with rice.
Thicker carrots were cut into large chunks and boiled with corn and brown rice to make carrot rice, served with a bowl of blanched greens for a delicious and healthy dinner.
Of course, after eating carrots for several days, my dining companions were a bit unsettled at first. But gradually, through the act of eating, they too began to feel the turning of the seasons and the flow of emotion between people. I felt honoured to share the sweetness of Chen Ying’s farming and eating life, and to pass on this traceable peace of mind and sweetness to more people through the ‘Little Dining Tables’, letting more experience what it means to have ‘grain in the house and peace in the heart’.
Images: Provided by the author unless otherwise noted
Editor: Xu Youyou