A Return Visit 100 Days After the Disaster: A Beijing Farm’s Long Road to Recovery
In the three months following the disaster, from anxious consumers to government officials at every level, nearly everyone posed the same question to Zhen Rui: “What is the way forward?”
In the early hours of 28 July 2025, extreme heavy rainfall battered the mountainous regions of northern Beijing. Flash floods, churning with silt and debris, overwhelmed the levees. Along the banks of the Qingshui River in Beizhuang Town, Miyun District, the Sohu Farm overseen by Zhen Rui was reduced to rubble overnight. Two local staff members narrowly escaped with their lives from the dark, raging waters.
This 450-mu plot (roughly 30 hectares) represents thirteen years of dedication for Zhen Rui, a farmer born in the 1980s. Since the autumn of 2012, he has cultivated sweetcorn, fruit trees, and vegetables on this land. He has tended over 100 small family plots leased by members, and over the years has also hosted visitors for riverside camping and birdwatching along the Qingshui River. From late June through early October, successive crops of corn ripen in turn, making the journey straight from field to table.
For over three months, Zhen Rui has been clearing the ruins, assessing the damage, meeting with government departments, and working tirelessly to rebuild the farm. Yet the future remains uncertain. How can cultivation continue? Where will the reconstruction funds come from? Could the disaster strike again?
His story is merely a microcosm of a wider crisis. Beginning on 23 July, this anomalous torrential downpour swept across the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, lasting 147 hours. It left 300,000 people affected, 144 missing or dead, and devastated vast tracts of permanently protected basic farmland. As extreme weather grows more frequent and rain belts gradually shift northwards to regions with less flood-management experience, how are farmers to survive?
I. Reclaiming the fields?
Yet Zhen Rui remains reluctant to give up the farm, driven by a sense of “responsibility and attachment.”
“Even if we can no longer cultivate this land in the way we once did, it would still be worthwhile if we could leave some warnings or insights for those who come after us,” he said.
II. Funding
The flood erased at least 30 million yuan worth of the farm’s past investments. Following the torrential rain, the perimeter wall collapsed and visitors arrived in a disorganised scramble. For a month, he and a fellow local staff member fought to keep their footing in the muck, salvaging the warehouse’s steel framework, door frames, and the battered remains of farm machinery. They sold the scrap in batches to recycling yards, netting a total of 30,000 yuan.
In the wake of the disaster, the local authorities promptly instructed the farm to submit figures on crop planting areas, projected yields, and losses to both agricultural and agritourism infrastructure. However, no compensation guidelines have yet been released.
The town council also indicated it would cover half the cost of reconstructing facilities such as greenhouses and storage sheds. “This is an act of nature; the government has no real obligation to ‘compensate’ us. We are grateful for that,” Zhen Rui said. “But the reality is that our operations have ground to a halt since the disaster. A single greenhouse costs around 300,000 yuan to build—where on earth are we supposed to find the remaining 150,000?”
“The one thing that is certain is that this flood has been a profound lesson,” Zhen Rui said.
For over four decades of his life, Zhen Rui has lived almost exclusively in the arid north, having “only ever seen floods on the news”. Fortune has generally been on his side: in 2018, an unusually prolonged rainy season left the corn struggling to pollinate and set, meaning the farm had nothing to sell for twenty consecutive days. Water levels in the nearby Qingshui River continued to rise, sweeping away a low-water bridge near the farm’s side entrance. Watching the bridge collapse, Zhen Rui first realised that climate change seemed terrifyingly close. But the weather quickly cleared, and the crisis passed.
In 2023, a typhoon dumped torrential rain on southern Beijing, claiming 33 lives and leaving 18 missing. Several neighbouring farms in the Fangshan district were devastated, leaving Zhen Rui feeling “a degree of relief” that his had escaped the worst.
Little did he expect that just two years later, catastrophic rainfall would strike Miyun. “I admit, I had grown somewhat complacent when it came to climate change,” he reflected.
Zhen Rui carries no insurance for his crops or agricultural infrastructure. The reasoning is straightforward: while premiums could run into tens of thousands of yuan annually, the eventual payouts would be limited. In the past decade, he considered purchasing agricultural insurance only once, after a hailstorm had battered the farm’s apricot trees the year before. He discovered that Anhua Agricultural Insurance offered a specific policy for apricot orchards, carrying a premium of just over 1,000 yuan. Whether he actually went ahead and bought it, he can barely recall.
Each year, he limits his coverage to statutory social security and accidental injury insurance for staff, alongside public liability insurance for guests attending activities such as glamping and birdwatching. The latter primarily covers personal injury and property damage resulting from accidents on the premises.
Since 2007, central and regional governments have provided premium subsidies to farmers purchasing agricultural insurance. This type of “policy-based agricultural insurance” covers crop cultivation, livestock breeding, and agricultural assets such as greenhouses and farm machinery.
In Beijing, for major crops such as maize, wheat, and rice, the central government subsidises 35% of the premium, the municipal government adds a further 25%, leaving farmers to pay just 40%.
Payout amounts are generally determined by the coverage level, the growth stage of the crops at the time of damage, and the extent of the affected area. Taking maize as an example, there are three coverage tiers: “basic crop insurance” (also known as “input cost insurance”), which covers fundamental cultivation expenses such as seeds, fertiliser, pesticides, mechanical tillage, and irrigation; “full-cost insurance”, which additionally accounts for land rent and labour costs; and “crop revenue insurance”, based on the expected income per mu from maize and covering the dual risks of yield loss from natural disasters and falling market prices. Premiums increase progressively across these tiers.
Prior to this, Zhen Rui “was unfamiliar with” these details; his understanding of agricultural insurance was largely limited to guarding against “unexpected events”.
By January 2024, figures released by the Fangshan District Government indicated that 18,900 mu of farmland affected by the 2023 deluge had received 16.2 million yuan in policy-backed insurance payouts, averaging 857 yuan per mu. A further 66,000 farming households and 89 agricultural enterprises received 443 million yuan in government relief and subsidies.
In fact, Beijing’s policy-backed agricultural insurance also covers agricultural property, extending to hardware such as farm machinery and polytunnels. Zhenrui had no idea this type of policy existed. “I did wonder afterwards whether I should have taken it out,” he says. “But then I reminded myself that profitability in this sector is already so slim. Paying out several tens of thousands of yuan a year for a policy covering a near-impossible event? That was never going to happen.”
III. The Cycle
The cycle began in the 1970s. What is now the farm site was once a river floodplain. As part of a nationwide drive to expand arable land under the “Learn from Dazhai” campaign, a layer of soil 30 to 40 centimetres thick was laid over the flats. It was not until the 1980s that the movement was called off on account of its environmental toll.
“Yet its symbolic meaning has endured,” Zhen Rui says. “It represents the drive to transform the environment to make it more conducive to production.”
In autumn 2012, another wave pushed Zhen Rui towards this land. As food safety scandals and smog regularly dominated the headlines, many middle-class professionals chose to “flee the city” and “return to the land”. Among them was Zhen Rui, who had recently graduated from China Agricultural University and was working at a seed company.
“At the time, there were many voices pondering how we ought to live in the future. Put more starkly: how are we actually going to survive?”
Shortly after taking over the farm, he took a spade and dug into numerous corners of the plot. Much of the soil was impoverished, lacking the capacity to retain water and nutrients.
Cow dung, purchased cheaply from nearby livestock farms, was scattered across the fields, covering the earth in thick, dark layers. “We used it freely, as though cost were no object.” To secure a steady supply of fertiliser, the farm once kept more than 3,000 chickens and over a dozen pigs, until avian flu and swine fever successively forced the animal sheds to close.
Many of his middle-class companions eventually left the land, but Zhen Rui stayed. As the soil quality gradually improved and its water retention strengthened, irrigation became less frequent. Once irregular plots were graded into terraced fields, with designated zones for different crops. Polythene tunnels and greenhouses rose up. Roads were rerouted for easier vehicle access. In line with the push for “integration of the three sectors” to boost revenue, the farm also branched out into birdwatching and camping.
It was not until this disaster that he began to reconsider his past endeavours. From river flats to fertile farmland, only to revert to the starting point overnight—was this a warning from nature?
“We may need to carefully reconsider what it truly means to ‘adapt to local conditions’. Previously, people assumed that ‘suitable’ simply meant being closer to the village and more convenient for farming. Now, shouldn’t we first take into account the river’s original course and the trajectory of climate change before rethinking how we use the land?”
Thirteen years into farming, the same question—“how are we actually going to survive?”—has resurfaced. This time, the answer hinges on an increasingly capricious climate.
Accidents have become the new normal; extreme weather has repeatedly shattered established understanding, forcing farmers to learn anew how to adapt to nature. On the other hand, how systemic safeguards such as land-use planning, disaster prevention and relief capacities, insurance and subsidy policies can provide a safety net for rural areas facing climate risks remains to be seen.
“If there is a next year, the corn will grow again. There will be a next year, for the corn to bear witness once more to how nutrients rise from the mud, and how sunflowers bloom again from the ruins.”
Zhen Rui wrote on 8 August in an article on his WeChat Official Account.
Unless otherwise stated, all images in this article were provided by the interviewee.
Editor: Pei Dan