Two and a Half Years as an Agriculture Reporter – Yet I Still “Can’t See” Food
Before long, though, I discovered that most of our story angles originated in listed companies’ announcements and earnings reports. My performance targets required over a dozen pieces a month, so the vast majority of my reporting was done by phone or WeChat, with a same-day deadline. On-the-ground visits were the rare exception.
So it came as no surprise that, even though I wrote about food every single day, I still couldn’t see food – the financial reports of large companies describe nothing but the macro picture. The descriptions are frustratingly vague. The three core financial statements (the balance sheet, the profit and loss account and the cash flow statement) simply cannot explain how food is grown, processed, consumed – or discarded along the way. Often I wondered: was I really a journalist?
I. The Abscessed Pork Nobody Sees
I still wanted to track where their pork ended up, so I kept digging and stumbled, quite by accident, on a thread.
On a short-video platform, someone had complained: “You can never finish trimming the abscesses off the front legs of their pigs.” He was talking about precisely that company. In the comments, one user replied, “Too many injections.” Another said, “I collected the abscessed meat to feed my dog.”
Their identities weren’t hard to guess – they were almost certainly slaughterhouse workers. In the live-pig slaughtering process, there is a step called carcase trimming. Parts of the carcass unfit for human consumption are cut away at this stage, becoming condemned meat. Some supermarkets and pork retailers carry out further precision trimming before putting the meat on sale.
“Injections” refers to vaccinations. If the vaccine has not been fully absorbed by the time a pig is slaughtered, abscesses form in the tissue. This is inevitably the result of farming companies pushing too hard for production efficiency – squeezing out yield has always been the livestock industry’s way of protecting its margins during a downcycle.
I had no capacity to chase it further at that moment. So I chose to set it aside and file the piece first.
Over those two years, most of my time went into macro-level agriculture stories. Covering big companies was, admittedly, good professional training: tracking business shifts and market challenges day after day, you quickly learn the shape of an industry, and business is an essential part of understanding how society works.
Yet after so much corporate coverage, I remained a layperson where farming was concerned, and in the end many of my reports could not break out of the framework of macro data analysis and supply-and-demand debate.
So when I stumbled on the “abscess” lead, I was genuinely thrilled. No one had written about it. Even from a pragmatic standpoint, if I could get to the bottom of the problem, perhaps the company’s PR team might finally look at me differently – in the past, getting through to them had been painfully difficult; they were like “the walking dead” in my address book, no matter how many calls I made or messages I sent, they ignored me. It was only after a colleague wrote a piece that “struck a nerve” that we managed to establish a tenuous line of communication with the firm.
But in the end, I still didn’t follow through on the lead. Most likely I shied away from the difficulty. No matter how I looked at it, the resources I had couldn’t support me in finding and interviewing people along the slaughter chain, or actually getting inside a slaughterhouse to find answers. And the deadline for my next piece was already bearing down.
II. When the Reporter’s Own Downcycle Arrives
Another example: in the meat duck supply chain, the meat itself is worth less than the by-products. Because it’s cheap yet still needs an outlet, some people pass it off as beef or mutton. A report also noted that much duck meat ultimately ends up in group catering at construction sites. In an era when meat, eggs and dairy are no longer scarce, it struck me for the first time that even consumption of these staples could draw a class line.
From this angle, if I hadn’t become an agriculture reporter, I probably wouldn’t have noticed price fluctuations at the market, still less wondered, while ordering groceries online or a takeaway, where the ingredients came from or who ended up eating them. Yet pressing people on why they’ve stopped buying milk, or why some eat duck meat too cheap to command respect, risks becoming its own version of “Why don’t they just eat meat porridge?” – the very question of a ruler who never went hungry.
We have a standard reporting framework, and one of its pillars is watching price movements. Price is a direct lever: it connects to macro markets yet mirrors every person’s daily spending. Price shifts usually stem from supply–demand imbalances. As it happens, the timing of my entry into agriculture coincided exactly with a price-downturn cycle, characterised by oversupply and falling consumption. The excess grew out of optimistic expectations during the upcycle: people behaved as though the market had no ceiling, nearly everyone scaled up investment, dreaming of windfall returns. But the cold reality is that upcycles end, and people trade down.
But agriculture that actually grows crops and raises pigs obviously doesn’t feature in that story. Every earnings season, the revenues of agricultural companies can’t even match the profits of tech or industrial firms. Most agriculture companies don’t sell directly to consumers, so they have little need to build a brand or work with the media. Add to that the fact that my derivative pieces genuinely attracted very few readers – my traffic always sat at the bottom – and I ultimately lost my job.
III. Can Standardisation Solve Everything?
This overcomes the twin curses of traditional farming – leaving everything to the weather, and produce that can’t be standardised – and reduces operational complexity. For the consumer, it means buying fruit is no longer like opening a blind box, where this time it tastes wonderful but next time the flavour is entirely different.
In Zhaotong, Yunnan, and Pinggu, Beijing, I had seen orchards built on similar principles. Between the trees, not only were the row and plant spacings uniform – every tree had been pruned into the same shape, like a military formation, so that every fruit received the same light. The harvest also undergoes standard grading: dedicated machines sort the fruit to guarantee uniformity in size, shape and even sweetness.
I even had the chance to try an intelligent tractor worth over a million yuan. While we were still debating whether autonomous driving is safe on city streets, the technology had already found a perfect use case – vast, open farmland. If Clarkson had bought a tractor fitted with autonomous driving assistance instead of a Lamborghini tractor, he probably wouldn’t have ploughed such crooked rows to begin with.
The livestock sector works the same way. Today, farming enterprises can use sensors to know precisely how much feed each pig has consumed, then calculate exactly how much meat that feed will yield – this kind of granular management effectively brings down feeding costs.
When I first started covering agriculture, I was genuinely thrilled by stories like these. I believed that, armed with technology, farming could overcome leaving everything to the weather, conquer all uncertainty, and eventually eliminate hunger so that everyone could eat better.
In fact, China’s urban consumers already enjoy that convenience. Living in Beijing, you can get fresh fruit and vegetables all year round. You can have groceries delivered to your door, order takeaway when you can’t be bothered to cook, or pop into a nearby restaurant to sort it all out…
Survival needs seem to be met so effortlessly that the act of truly “eating” has grown weightless. You can’t see the food, you can’t see the process that produced it, and waste is no longer something to feel ashamed of. “Who knows that every grain on the plate is the product of hard toil?” has become a moral constraint so easily breezed past that the government had to step in and launch the Clean Plate Campaign to teach people again.
As a consumer, perhaps more transparent information could ease the anxiety. But as a journalist – a link in the chain of information – I feel even more powerless. Companies talk about scaling up, about farm-direct sourcing, contract farming, QR-code traceability… Most of the time, all I can do is take their business judgement and solutions on faith, becoming a tool of their market education.
And yet I couldn’t wholeheartedly embrace that commercial world either. Even logically speaking, scaled-up production doesn’t really mean safety – it simply means that when something goes wrong, it goes wrong on a larger scale. Layer on the vast agri-food distribution system, and the fallout reaches further still.
I also carry a quiet unease. My cattle-raising friend once told me that back in his hometown – Darhan Muminggan United Banner in Baotou – many people see going home to raise cattle as a refuge. Today, “returning to the land” is a favourite topic for the media. But if they do go back and farm on this model, the costs will be astronomically high, and they will still face cyclical swings in agricultural prices. Is going home to farm really a way out? And if all the smallholders quit agriculture, will they truly find a better life in the city?
IV. My Experimental Plot
Of course, I didn’t. But at least I deepened my understanding of my beat in the most hands-on way possible.
At the end of July, when the crops were at their very best, I had to go on a business trip – nine days in total. Just before I left, I’d asked a friend to help water the plants. Then I checked the forecast: Beijing was in for days of rain, so I told my friend not to bother.
When I got back, the rain was still lashing the city. The plot had turned into a mud bath – no foot could find purchase – so for roughly a fortnight, on and off, I couldn’t get close enough to check on my little patch. I figured the weather would tend the vegetables for me.
What met my eyes was devastation. Every leafy vegetable was dead. The peppers had rotted in the waterlogged soil. A few tomato plants had survived, though “barely clinging on” was the kindest way to describe them. Only the plants untouched by centuries of human domestication and selective breeding – the mint and the perilla – were still thriving after the downpour.
Through August, with the heat and relentless rain, even my replanted seedlings failed to survive. I wasn’t alone: the weather had battered vegetable growers as badly as it had battered me. Last summer, vegetable prices spiked. In the face of climate shifts, novices and seasoned hands are nearly as fragile.
It wasn’t just the weather that tested me. My body paid for the farming, too.
In the beginning, I decided not to pull the weeds. I’d read that leaving them in place provides more ground cover for the soil, and that preserving their root systems causes less disruption to the soil’s microbial environment.
But almost every passer-by stopped to ask the same question: “Why aren’t you pulling those weeds?” One day, an elderly neighbour did the same, and I excitedly shared everything I’d learned.
His reply was a question of his own: “Did you read that on Douyin?” His implication was plain – I’d been taken in by the internet. I tried to argue further, but only provoked his irritation. I never mended our neighbourly goodwill, and the next time we crossed paths at the farm, he refused to acknowledge me.
In the end I couldn’t hold out against the pressure and fought a long war against the weeds. Squatting in the mud to pull them left me with a knee injury that didn’t fully heal until this summer.
Farming, apart from its therapeutic value, hasn’t done much to help my work as an agriculture reporter. In the end, I still need to find answers on a professional level.
Agriculture does throw up new angles: new-generation farmers returning to the land, consumer brands stepping into upstream cultivation, even fresh produce cropping up in hotpot and bubble-tea menus… There’s no shortage of topics. But can these topics truly bear the weight of agriculture?
While writing about Shine Muscat, I met a woman. After a great deal of effort to convince her I was a journalist, she became visibly agitated and launched into a tirade against the press. Her family’s construction business had been swindled out of a great deal of money. They’d turned to growing Shine Muscat to make ends meet, only to run straight into a market crash. My interview, she said, was just another stab in the wound.
That day, I’d made a mess of things. I tried to make amends over WeChat and text messages, and it took no small effort to calm her down. She even sent me her husband’s number, asking me to have a chat with him.
I never contacted them again, and I deleted our entire conversation. By then I’d gathered more than enough material from growers, and the story was straightforward – write about how the Shine Muscat variety had failed – so there was no need to intrude on them any further. Besides, a flimsy angle couldn’t hold the weight of that family’s pain.
Over those two and a half years, so many moments like these forced me to ask: what kind of agriculture reporting do I actually want to do, and how?
Occasionally I think of my former editor. He used to say, “Our advantage is that we’re with people in the industry every single day, so we learn about changes before anyone else.” That struck a chord, and I held it as gospel.
Since coming to cover agriculture, after two and a half years of filing, the face agriculture shows me has grown ever more complex. It isn’t just a business model; it is about people’s livelihoods. It isn’t just smart agriculture; it has its traditional face, too. I find myself less and less content to report on farming through a purely commercial lens.
I still don’t know exactly how to go about it. But I can no longer write about agriculture as an outsider. The only method I can think of is my former editor’s words: be with the people in this industry every single day. I need to get closer.
Today, when everyone can get a full belly, agriculture receives far too little attention – nowhere near the buzz surrounding the booming tech sector. Yet agriculture, too, is undergoing earth-shaking change, and it is every bit a goldmine for journalism, with vast territory waiting to be explored and reported.
If you share the author’s bewilderment and would like to understand more deeply the logic and details behind the food on your plate, and gain first-hand insight into agriculture, please join the Foodthink Agri-Food Media Workshop, organised for early September. Foodthink will invite media professionals who have covered food, farming and the environment for years to share their experience and methods, and this article’s author will be there to exchange views.
Edited by Auntie Xiong