A Quest for Sustainable Practices: Chronicles from a Tour of Ecological Farms
I. Setting out with questions in mind
Guixinyuan Farm practises ecological agriculture, eschewing pesticides, synthetic fertilisers, and herbicides. Its owner, Brother Qiang, is a permaculture design specialist. Spanning over a hundred *mu* of woodland, ponds, and fields, the farm’s integrated layout is arguably the most holistic I have encountered. Yet Brother Qiang is rarely on site; day-to-day cultivation is managed by two experienced growers. Gradually, I began to sense that I did not fully endorse some of their methods.
It amounted to a stance of “confrontation with the land and its flora”: heaving a hoe to turn the earth, running a rotary tiller to prepare the soil, and spending much of each day on weeding. Where weed roots ran deep, they were wrenched out by force; where soil fertility was low and crops languished, fertiliser was applied to force them into growth. But sustained over time, this approach drains the soil of its vitality. Once stripped of cover, the earth quickly hardens and crusts, merely triggering a fresh cycle of secondary succession—the land simply reverts to growing grass.
II. Guangzhou – Pengcheng Natural Farm (5.9)
The farm sits on a slope and features a combined living space and tea room, where Teacher Pengcheng’s family of three resides. There is also a small bread oven, an earthen building under construction, and a small pavilion further up. Spanning over 40 mu of hillside, the land is primarily devoted to fruit trees, with a mountain stream winding through it. Lychee trees thrive thickly along the lower banks, creating a distinctly tropical landscape. Pengcheng is, without doubt, the most beautiful farm I have ever visited.
Teacher Pengcheng practices natural farming. At present, he uses only a minimal amount of earthworm castings, but his objective is clear: to pursue no-tillage, no fertiliser, and no deliberate mulching. He says, “Fertiliser is like medicine.” The farm radiates a natural vitality.
Sweet potatoes, lychee, and guava are the farm’s main sources of income. Teacher Pengcheng believes both lychee and guava are well suited to this land. Out in the fields, he used the guava tree as an example to explain the difference between vegetative and reproductive growth, showing how pruning can control when the trees put out foliage and when they flower and fruit. With enough skill, you can even shape a tree exactly to your liking simply by pinching off the tender shoots without damaging the branches.
Yet, when it comes to the various pruning techniques used to manipulate fruit trees, Teacher Pengcheng has his own perspective.
He explains that fruit trees naturally possess a “natural form”—their original structure when left entirely unpruned. Farmers chasing higher yields prune to keep the trees short and encourage faster, heavier cropping. But once a tree is pruned even once, its branches tend to grow in a chaotic manner, requiring constant trimming to maintain balance. Unfortunately, commercially bought saplings are rarely in their natural form, meaning they will inevitably need pruning as they mature. He is currently running small-scale experiments on a few trees, attempting to guide them back to their natural form through careful pruning.
Beyond fruit trees, he has also experimented with growing maize, taro, and other crops. His approach here is far more hands-off—he simply cuts a narrow path through the grass at planting time, drops seeds in using a dibber, and tramples the surrounding grass down to form a natural cover. A patch of chilli peppers managed in this way thrived impressively. Thanks to soil that had been left to fallow for five or six years and was deeply fertile, the chilli plants grew vigorously, leaving a lasting impression.
Along the way, whenever we asked various technical questions, Teacher Pengcheng would always reply, “It’s not absolute.” There are no rigid rules on the land: whether to prune, mow, or fertilise depends entirely on the climate, the condition of the soil, and the state of the crops. Of course, it also “depends on what you want”—his second favourite saying. While some farmers prioritise high yields, he yearns for a more unfettered life, hoping that one day he can manage his orchard with less effort. This is why he embraces natural farming: to minimise human interference and let nature take care of the trees.
III. Guangzhou – Yinlin Ecological Farm (9–10 May)
Farm owner Teacher Guo Rui guided us through the premises. The living quarters feature a kitchen, guesthouse, café, store, and dispatch area, while the cultivation zone is lined with numerous greenhouses. Whether in spatial layout or day-to-day cultivation, everything appeared meticulously ordered.
Growing vegetables in hot, humid Guangdong is notoriously difficult. The farm’s greenhouses come in handy, serving to keep pests out and regulate irrigation. But every advantage has its downside: take courgettes, for example. To combat the fruit fly, which is rampant in Guangdong, our farm can only use bagging for protection. However, bags must be kept off until flowering to allow natural pollination, by which time the flies have often already laid their eggs inside the developing fruit. At Yinlin Farm, the courgettes grow under cover and remain pest-free, but the absence of natural pollinators means hand pollination is required to secure a yield.
The farm also purchases local materials such as traditional Chinese medicine residues and kitchen waste to produce compost. Compost leachate is collected and processed into liquid fertiliser in a dedicated facility, requiring a secondary fermentation before application. In contrast to natural farming methods, Teacher Guo Rui does not shy away from techniques such as greenhouse cultivation or fertilisation; rather, he uses them within sensible limits, aiming to strike a balance between ecological care and agricultural yield.
The farm spans around 70 to 80 mu (roughly 5 hectares). Day-to-day field management falls mostly to local women who are accustomed to more conventional farming methods. Consequently, communicating with them proved rather tricky. For example, Mr Guo Rui advocates preventing soil from being left bare and suggests leaving weed roots in the ground—simply cutting the tops and spreading them as mulch in situ—yet it was hard to convince the workers to adopt this method.
At the same time, the farm has drawn in a cohort of young ‘new villagers’. Some are merely using the farm’s premises for their own enterprises (such as the ‘Eating Earth’ workshop, which sells bread), while others have taken up active cultivation, forming experimental ‘planting groups’. This gathering of people and energy keeps the farm consistently vibrant.
IV. Guigang, Guangxi – Happy Herb Garden (12–14 May)
At the Pengcheng and Yinlin farms, we covered our food and lodging at the standard rate for visiting farmers, but Baicaoyuan felt more like home. The farm’s host, Sister Yan Ping, had the beds made long before we arrived, and we brought with us a host of specialties from Guixinyuan: *Litsea cubeba* floral water, sand ginger and dried roselle, marigold and patchouli seeds, and heritage sweet potatoes.
Baicaoyuan is also set in the hills, requiring a walk up a mountain path after we step out of the car. As far as the eye can see, the entire hillside is planted with Wogan mandarins. One side is a deep, dark green, the other slightly yellowed, with a clear dividing line between them. Sister Yan Ping tells us the yellowing trees are ours.
The farm practises a complete ‘lazy farming’ approach: no fertiliser, no pesticides, and the grass in the fields is allowed to grow tall. Last year, because of stem borers, the harvest dropped significantly compared to previous years, coming in at under 30,000 *jin*. The pest infestation also claimed several citrus trees, but Sister Yan Ping remained unfazed. She and Liu Heng (a Phase II ecological agriculture intern with Foodthink) introduced a few new varieties of fruit trees to diversify the grove.
Each day’s routine labour is simply patrolling the hills. We followed Sister Yan Ping, gathering wood ear mushrooms from around the rotting tree roots, and mulching around the fruit trees—using sickles to lay down the overgrown grass and spread it over the base of each tree. Finally, we foraged some canna lilies, beggar’s ticks, and Chinese knotweed to take back for dinner.
After supper, we sat round a fire bowl, chatting and warming our feet over the heat. Branches of rock pine and mugwort smouldered inside, driving the insects away. Outside, the fireflies began to emerge in earnest, so we moved to a little shed on the hillside to drink and watch the hillsides blaze with their light.
V. Guigang – Shande Planting and Breeding Farm (5.13)
Teacher Gan is a truly remarkable person. To quote Liu Heng: “eccentric yet endearing.” He leads a deeply traditional life. His walls display photographs of successive national leaders alongside portraits of family ancestors, as well as ancestral precepts. His six children do not attend school, opting instead for a life of “farming and studying” at home. While working in the fields together, I was struck by how the youngest daughter not only recognised every crop but already understood the principles of composting. Before each meal, the family gathers in the centre of the main hall to recite a blessing, giving thanks for all that makes the food possible: friends, family, and Mother Earth.
His farm is renowned for its rice paddies. Alongside rice, they sell a variety of rice-based products—rice tea, rice crackers, and rice noodles. At lunch, I reached to serve myself some noodles, but he held up a hand, saying they needed to rest a while longer before eating. When we finally dined, he showed us how to gently scoop them up with both spoon and chopsticks, transferring them to our bowls with the utmost care. It was arguably the most moving meal I have ever shared. Not only were the fried rice, noodles, and stir-fried soybeans with dried vegetables exceptionally delicious, but it was the principle that one must “treat food with gentleness” that truly stayed with me.
Later, we walked through his fields. I cannot quite recall the precise methods he uses for weed control or composting, nor did it feel entirely important to pin down. What left a lasting impression was his philosophy of life. On the drive back, I found myself musing: is it really alright to skip formal schooling altogether? To forego academic knowledge and the chance to see the wider world?
VI. Baise – Huashan Farm (15–16 May)
He now works in Laos, returning only once every few months, while Wanxuan lives alone in the mountains, looking after more than a dozen dogs and tending 200 mu of land (roughly 30 hectares). That day, she paddled a bamboo raft across the river to meet us. Standing on the raft and gazing out over the water, I felt as though I had crossed another invisible threshold: I had never imagined this journey would take me so far.
Lacking basic infrastructure, Huashan Farm pushes modern endurance to its very limit: power lines cannot be strung across the river, forcing reliance on a modest solar array; construction on agricultural land is prohibited, leaving only a rudimentary wooden cabin; out in this remote wilderness, Shiniang keeps over a dozen large dogs for safety, and merely feeding them consumes half the day’s labour. Yet we sat in just such a cabin, ringed by the dogs, sharing a free-range chicken soup simmered on a wood-fired stove with sweet potato leaves and red mugwort in the broth—rustic, yet wonderfully fragrant. In the evenings, we huddled around the precious pool of light to talk. Shiniang is wonderfully gregarious; she could laugh unreservedly even while recounting how a fierce night storm had recently blown the roof off. We’ve all taken to calling her a woman of remarkable fortitude.
Yet Shiniang’s journey has been far more arduous than we could have imagined. Teacher Luo later explained that when they broke ground in 2019, they initially planted crisp honey kumquats, only to discover the conditions were unsuitable. They switched to oil-tea camellias in 2021, but nature pushed back; aggressive weeds rapidly smothered many of the seedlings. It was not until 2022, when they began tending each tree individually, that survival rates finally started to improve. Those intervening years were lost, and the camellia stand still has not fully established itself. During the leanest months, just to put food on the table, Shiniang would leave the farm to take on gruelling manual labour, ring-barking fruit trees for neighbouring growers.
We spent the night sheltering in our tent inside the cabin as the rain fell, but by morning the skies had cleared and we headed out to survey the slopes. Secondary succession was already well under way across the woodland; the grass had grown thick, leaving the young oil-tea camellias looking woefully outmatched. Yanping insisted that simply trampling the grass was still the right approach, but Shiniang grew uneasy. Her parents-in-law regularly came up to the mountain to help and were tireless at weeding, whereas she, with no agricultural background herself, was left unsure of the right course of action.
Teacher Luo had once hoped Yanping would join them to run Huashan Farm, as the work—whether building infrastructure, planting, or day-to-day management—desperately demanded more hands. Shiniang simply could not manage some 200 mu (roughly 13 hectares) of land single-handedly, let alone bare-handed. Though the reality remains stark, Teacher Luo’s family retains a steadfast optimism: regardless of the hardships, so long as there is mountain and soil, life can endure. Besides, in their eyes, the farm is barely off the ground, and the road ahead is still very long.
VII. Returning to Guixinyuan
The moment we arrived back at Guixinyuan, the farm welcomed a teacher from Taiwan. As I showed him around, I pointed to the bare soil and asked what he thought. It was merely an offhand question, but he immediately caught my underlying concern. “It isn’t ideal, naturally, but it is the result of compromise,” he replied.
He explained that the two senior farmers on the farm would need time to gradually adapt their mindset. While choosing the right farming method is undoubtedly important, harmony among the people is equally crucial. His words gave me pause. Reflecting on the past six weeks of working through our differences with Master Ajang, I realised that in addition to farming methods, we also need to strive to understand each other’s perspectives through our shared work in the fields, and learn to accept the different ways people handle their tasks.
Later, we also had a chat with Master Jiang from the farm. In fact, he understood the principles behind soil remediation, as well as the benefits of leaving grass to grow and practising diverse cropping. But as he pointed out, “after all, this land isn’t his own; the lease is only for twenty years.” If he relied on time to gradually restore the soil, by the time the land was fully revitalised, his lease would have run out. Conversely, if the goal is to maximise yields, monocropping alongside routine weeding and fertilising remains the most efficient way to manage the land.
Compared with before I set off, my mental picture of “agriculture” has become far more holistic: from a single small plot, one can glimpse the varied philosophies and aspirations of farmers, as well as the broader landscape of land tenure and agricultural systems. Though ecological agriculture remains on the fringes of this wider picture, it is perhaps also its most inclusive and socially significant aspect. At Guixinyuan Farm, I gained an introduction to agriculture, but I also found friendship — and once you step out into the wider world, places that welcome beginners with such openness are becoming rare indeed.
Throughout the ten-day journey, the book *The Half-Farm, Half-X Life* kept me company. Seeing ecological farming peers scattered across the Guangdong–Guangxi region, their individual sparks connecting to form a continuous thread, I grew ever more convinced of the viability of this way of life — cultivating a patch of land using natural farming methods to meet one’s own household food needs, while pursuing a part-time vocation to supplement income and enrich one’s daily life. By the time the journey drew to a close, I could finally say: this is where my aspirations truly lie.
Shortly after arriving at the farm, we were right in the thick of peanut planting. For several days running, I went up the hill to cut brake ferns for mulching, then left it to get on with it. One day, walking past the peanut patch, I suddenly noticed it had turned into a lush carpet of green. It was a truly magical moment: in an instant, I felt the sheer power of the soil. The weeds grew right alongside the peanuts, first sprouting between the ridges and then spreading onto the beds after the rain. For the past while, I’ve been entirely occupied with keeping them in check.
Managing the vegetation brought plenty of discoveries: the plants growing along the ridge edges helped bind the soil, stopping it from washing away entirely in heavy rain; ladybirds take to black nightshade, whilst stink bugs have a particular fondness for another seed-bearing weed, so I’ve left a distant patch strictly for them. Between the ridges, I cut the weeds but leave the roots undisturbed; on the beds themselves, I pull them out right near the peanut roots. This happens to aerate the soil nicely, allowing fallen blossoms to peg into the earth. The cuttings are carried away in basket loads to feed the fish in the pond nearby. Over half a day, I can make my way through three or four baskets.
To date, three recruitment rounds have been completed, supporting over 60 participants across more than ten ecological farms nationwide for placements ranging from three months to a year.
Editor: Wang Hao