Chayote Seedlings Break Through: Climate, Seeds and the County Crop Trend
I. The Seed Bottleneck
2024 brought multiple spells of extreme rainfall to Guangxi. In Mashan, the relentless downpours caused severe waterlogging in the first half of the year, leaving the chayote crops to rot. When the rainy season finally passed, growers rushed to snap up seeds from neighbouring regions, only to be hit by a severe drought in the second half. From last year’s National Day through to this year’s Spring Festival, not a single drop of rain fell. Because young seedlings demand significant water, most of the expensive seeds they bought ended up withering in the parched earth.
The crisis extended beyond crops; even drinking water became scarce. The public swimming pool in Gula Village, Guzai, Mashan, ran completely dry for the first time in forty years. The government had to dispatch fire engines to deliver water to the community. During the Spring Festival, people were unable to even wash themselves. As groundwater levels dropped, house foundations subsided, cracking the walls.
The Mashan ancient village lies roughly a two-hour drive north of Nanning and has traditionally experienced an arid climate. Farmers spread maize stalks over the field ridges to retain soil moisture, allowing them to rot down and act as fertiliser. Yet last year’s drought was so intense that the stalks simply refused to decompose.
As the old farming adage goes, dry weather invites pests and dampness invites disease. The region’s staple crop, maize, was hit by an unusually aggressive outbreak of pests and diseases. “It has eaten down to the stalks,” locals remarked.
In late February, we visited Shanggutun in the Mashan ancient village. Lu Rongyan, head of the Mashan County Rongyan Ecological Planting and Breeding Professional Cooperative, frowned whenever chayote was mentioned. Unlike most vegetables, chayote seedlings must be planted using fresh fruit. Should the crop fail completely, farmers are forced to source seeds from the market. “We placed an order for the latest batch with a supplier in Guizhou on 9 February, but by 20 February it still had not been dispatched. We are anxious, but there is little we can do about it.”
At a planting rate of 1,000 fruits per mu, a healthy seed fruit typically weighs more than one jin (500 grams). With current market prices climbing to 1.2 yuan per jin, the cost of seed fruit alone now amounts to between 1,200 and 1,500 yuan per mu.
Rong Yan was among the first in Mashan to grow and sell chayote seedlings. She has watched firsthand how the region’s farmers have been gradually squeezed by out-of-town suppliers. When they first sourced seeds from Yunnan and Guizhou, prices were relatively modest and operated on a deposit basis. Today, with seeds in high demand, the Guizhou supplier Rong deals with now demands full payment upfront.
In October 2024, possibly due to inadequate maturity, half of the seeds brought in from outside the region spoiled. The batch purchased in January 2025 suffered from low temperatures, yielding a very poor germination rate. With few alternatives, farmers have had no choice but to continue buying from the Guizhou supplier, while bracing for steadily climbing prices.
II. The Rise of Chayote Seedlings
In the 1990s, Dr Song Yiqing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Centre for Agricultural Policy Research observed, during a maize germplasm assessment project, that the widespread adoption of commercial maize varieties was causing indigenous cultivars across four southwestern provinces, including Guangxi, to deteriorate and vanish. In response, she mobilised researchers and farmers to undertake collaborative breeding work. Side by side in the fields, they collected, purified, revitalised, and conserved local varieties.
Just as scientists were noting the rapid loss of farm-saved seeds, Rong Yan observed the same problem in her own farming: villagers were replacing local heritage varieties with hybrids to boost yields. But this shift brought a dependency on chemical fertilisers, pesticides, and agro-input companies. Excessive chemical use, in turn, led to soil degradation and increasingly unstable crop varieties.
By contrast, while the taller local varieties were harder to manage and yielded less, they offered superior flavour and proved more resistant to pests and diseases.
From 2000, Rong Yan, then in her early thirties, partnered with experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Guangxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Leading a group of ten farming households, she formed a participatory breeding team to breed and conserve seeds for local maize and vegetables that were rapidly disappearing. They also set up a community seed bank.
They discovered that saving their own seeds cut costs for commercially bought seeds, fertilisers and pesticides, while promoting soil health and food safety. Alongside these practical benefits, the culinary and cultural memories tied to the seeds were preserved and passed on. The initiative also reinvigorated community organisation; in an era where rural youth were migrating for work, it helped the elderly and women left behind rebuild a sense of connection and confidence in village life.
Such community seed banks are far from isolated cases. In 2013, Dr Song Yiqing founded the non-profit organisation the Farmers’ Seed Network, which supports rural communities across the country in selecting and breeding farm-saved seeds, keeping seed resources firmly in the hands of local people.
Bolstered by this rich local germplasm collection, Rong Yan took a significant step forward. Leading twenty-seven elderly villagers and women, she established the Rong Yan Ecological Planting and Breeding Cooperative to pursue agroecological farming. To produce safe, healthy food, the cooperative avoids chemical fertilisers and pesticides altogether. Even its native pigs and chickens are raised on feeds free from additives.
But who would buy the produce? Around that time, Tusheng Liangpin opened in Nanning, establishing itself as one of China’s earliest Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) restaurants. The venue sourced its ingredients from local ecological smallholders, Rong Yan among them.
Supplying restaurants demands a reliable, consistent flow of produce – a far cry from the traditional practice of carrying a pole of vegetables to sell at a roadside stall.
To meet restaurant purchasing requirements, the cooperative worked tirelessly to broaden both the range and volume of vegetables and meat available. They established a five-mu breeding base dedicated to local varieties, while simultaneously running comparative trials on soil and climate conditions across hilly and flat terrain to ensure rigorous quality control.
Just as business was beginning to pick up, however, the Tusheng Liangpin outlet in Nanning closed its doors due to sluggish trade. It served as another hard lesson for Rong Yan: relying on a single sales channel is fraught with risk.
She began scouting alternative channels for ecological produce around Mashan County – from the Nanning Urban Farmers’ Market to mothers’ group-buying chats. To break into new markets, the cooperative trialled numerous promising varieties, such as the sweet-and-sour, juicy ‘Mao Xiucai’ tomato and ridged luffah. The Farmers’ Seed Network even backed their attempts to domesticate wild greens like bushy amaranth and wolfberry leaves, yet unfortunately, none achieved satisfactory commercial traction.
Fortunately, their commitment to conserving heritage varieties never wavered. If one crop failed to catch on, they simply moved on to the next. Through this iterative process of trial and error, they eventually stumbled upon chayote shoots.
The precise date when chayote arrived in Mashan is now lost to history. Nevertheless, in Rong Yan’s memory, it has always been regarded as a traditional local variety. Historically, villagers would consume the fruit but leave the shoots untouched; it was not until 2013 that people began harvesting the young shoots for the table. Across Guangxi, chayote shoots are widely known as ‘dragon’s beard vegetable’, a name derived from their slender, curling tendrils that evoke a dragon’s whiskers. They offer a refreshingly crisp and tender bite, making them perfectly suited to quick stir-fries, chilled salads, or simmering in hot pots.
Rong Yan favours chayote because it thrives on farmyard manure; applying chemical fertilisers tends to rot the roots. It is also largely free from pests and diseases, with slugs being the most common issue, easily managed with tea seed cake. In short, chayote is highly suited to ecological farming, aligning perfectly with Rong Yan’s farming philosophy.
From 2014 to 2015, to open up new markets, Rong Yan mobilised actors from the village’s theatre troupe and cooperative administrators. Each month, they travelled to urban farmers’ markets and mums’ group gatherings in Nanning to promote the crop, performing the “Da Lang” ethnic dance—a recognised intangible cultural heritage—to attract customers. She also set up stalls at various agricultural markets across Nanning, gifting complimentary seedlings to selected vendors to help build awareness.
Gradually, chayote seedlings won over the Nanning market, becoming the cooperative’s flagship product.
III. Seedlings Revitalise the Countryside
Prior to 2017, chayote was cultivated on a modest scale locally but was remarkably easy to manage. The plant remains productive for three to five years. With proper watering and fertilising, each mu of land yields around fifty jin (twenty-five kilograms) of shoots every day or two. At a field price of two yuan per jin, this works out to one hundred yuan per harvest. Picking runs from February through November. Cultivation costs are low, and the crop requires no machinery, pesticides, or chemical fertilisers. By making a daily round of the fields to gather shoots, carrying them in bamboo baskets to the cooperative, and being weighed and paid on the spot, farmers can earn a steady income. This arrangement is ideal for older residents and women who are unable to travel for migrant work.
Mashan County is characterised by typical karst topography, where the surface struggles to retain water, giving rise to the local saying, “nine parts rock, one part soil.” For generations, farmers have survived by planting maize in the crevices between stones, while the younger workforce largely migrates for employment. In the quieter months, older residents sit under the eaves of street-facing homes, crafting handmade floral hair ornaments to earn a living—making at most ten to twenty yuan a day.
By comparison, growing chayote seedlings requires little investment, yields strong returns, and carries minimal risk. This is why they were initially cultivated mainly by older women. For most of their lives, these women had had no pocket money of their own; now, planting the vines and harvesting the seedlings brings immediate cash. That modest sum of disposable income has granted them a sense of autonomy they have never known before.
Freshness is critical for seedlings. Picked from the field, they must reach the market as quickly as possible to fetch a decent price. To catch the first bus to the county town at precisely seven o’clock, farmers must head into the fields between three and four in the morning to harvest, a time when they frequently encounter snakes.
In 2019, the co-operative secured a government loan to build cold storage and purchase refrigerated trucks. This eased the strain on production. Farmers can now head out to harvest once the moon is up, the co-operative packs and loads the trucks by midnight, and the seedlings are dispatched to the vegetable logistics centre first thing the next morning.
Farmers in neighbouring villages and towns quickly followed suit. The township government embraced the crop as a central strategy for rural revitalisation, introducing incentive policies and hosting training sessions to boost enthusiasm for chayote cultivation.
In just five years, the cultivation area across the township swelled from 300 to 2,000 mu. The shoots have sparked one income-boosting success story after another. According to local media reports, the impact is already evident in the neighbouring village of Gujin—
Villager B, who looks after her grandchildren at home, has planted chayote seedlings across all 2 mu of her land. This year, seedling harvesting alone has netted her over 10,000 yuan. On a single day, her earnings reached 359 yuan, setting a personal record for the village.
By October 2023, according to Guangxi News Network, all nine villages in the township had taken up chayote seedling cultivation, generating a total output value of 7 million yuan. The crop yields an average annual income of over 5,000 yuan per mu. Today, the township’s seedlings command an 80 per cent share of the local market for comparable vegetable varieties within Nanning’s urban fresh produce supply.
Today, Guzhai Yao Ethnic Township alone is home to five specialised chayote cooperatives. Rumour has it that new entrants follow Rong Yan’s delivery lorries into the city in their own cars, keen to identify which buyers are purchasing the seedlings. Once back, they descend on the fields to intercept growers, insisting they sell their crop directly to them.
“There are simply too many bosses these days,” Rong Yan remarks. By “bosses,” she refers to these newly established cooperatives. Although farmers are nominally cooperative members, the arrangement lacks clearly defined rights and obligations binding them. “Growers naturally gravitate towards whoever offers a better price or whom they know better. But since nobody wants to burn bridges, they end up supplying a portion of their seedlings to every buyer.”
Fierce competition is compelling these “bosses” to improve efficiency. By October 2022, Guzhai Yao Ethnic Township had constructed six industrial cold-storage facilities with a combined capacity of over 400 cubic metres, alongside two refrigerated transport vehicles. Neighbouring townships are likewise establishing their own cooperatives, with officials from township down to village level marshalling resources to vigorously promote chayote seedling cultivation. According to Nanning News Network, in 2024 the first secretary of Dalun Village in Mashan County raised funds out of pocket to subsidise growers, covering 40 per cent of the cost per seedling—“bringing the total number of subsidised chayote seedlings to over 20,000.”
Once the Nanning market was cornered, Rong Yan began selling seedlings to Foshan and Shenzhen. Buyers in Guangdong place a premium on appearance; the seedlings must be uniformly green and aesthetically pleasing. Consequently, for every 10 jin of seedlings gathered, cooperatives are forced to discard 4 jin as rejects. They also incur labour costs of 10 yuan per hour to hire pickers.
It is not just Rong Yan who feels this way; every local ‘boss’ is scrambling to secure seedlings.
Last year’s crop shortfall triggered a supply squeeze, pushing the field acquisition price for chayote seedlings as high as 3 yuan per jin. Yet some of the younger farmers who had stayed behind to grow chayote seedlings, having weathered both severe floods and droughts, eventually lost heart and headed back to the cities for work. Even Rong Yan’s eldest son gave up on chayote seedlings and left to find employment elsewhere.
IV. Preserve the Seeds, or Switch Varieties?
Even with support from the Farmer Seed Network, villagers have become adept at conserving and breeding seeds. Yet for chayote—a vegetable with a highly specific propagation method—they have yet to draw up a proper seed-saving contingency.
“If natural disasters strike, seeds will inevitably become more expensive the following year, so it is crucial to stay prepared,” advises Li Wenjia, a researcher at the Vegetable Research Institute of the Guangxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
Invited by the Farmer Seed Network, Li Wenjia also joined this field visit. Her advice on saving chayote seeds is straightforward, bordering on common sense: farmers must maintain a mindset of disaster preparedness and reserve enough seeds for the coming year.
As for how to do it, it comes down to simple arithmetic: plant 1,000 chayotes per mu, and assuming each vine yields at least 10 fruits, set aside one fen (one-hundredth of a mu) for seed saving. The 100 plants on that plot can initially be harvested for seedlings to sell, while later the vines are left to bear fruit for next year’s planting. This secures a reliable seed supply and prevents farmers from being left vulnerable to external supply bottlenecks.
Should a disaster like the one in 2024 occur again, the best strategy for households is to direct their limited water supply towards protecting the seeds. As long as they survive the dry season and the following year’s climate returns to normal, production can resume as usual. Some local farmers have already adopted this approach. After weathering the disaster, they were even able to sell surplus seeds to their neighbours.
The Farmer Seed Network supports multiple rural communities across the country in establishing seed banks to exchange varieties and expand the genetic pool of traditional farm seeds. Last year, upon learning of the crisis facing chayote farmers in Mashan, Stone City Village in Lijiang, Yunnan, urgently dispatched a batch of chayote seeds through the network. However, due to the long journey, many of the sprouts emerging from the base of the fruits had dried out by the time they arrived in Mashan, resulting in a low survival rate for this batch.
Reflecting on the hardship, the conclusion remains the same: self-reliance is essential.
Rong Yan has tried propagating seedlings through vine cuttings, but with poor results: the roots either rotted, or the resulting seedlings were exceedingly weak. In short, at present, there is no better method than using the fruit as seed.
Earlier this year, Rong Yan leased another 60 mu of land in a neighbouring village to serve as a chayote cultivation base. She chose this location because it lies deeper in the mountains and has slightly better water access. Securing such a plot is no easy feat; it must be resilient to drought and flooding, while also keeping wildlife at bay. Macaques frequently raid corn crops and are notoriously vengeful. Local villagers are reluctant to provoke them, often afraid to even intervene when monkeys steal their grain.
Even if Mashan farmers succeed in saving their own seeds and break free from external dependency, what will they do when faced with future floods or droughts?
This is far from an unwarranted fear. Earlier this year, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record, with global temperatures rising 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels—surpassing the 1.5°C threshold. This signals that the impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly pronounced, raising the risks of floods, droughts, pests, diseases, and extreme heat. Ultimately, the burden of these shifts will fall squarely on farmers.
If droughts and floods become even more frequent, could farmers switch to varieties with greater climate resilience?
On a bookshelf in Researcher Li Wenjia’s office hang two massive phylogenetic charts of eggplant species. Radiating from a central root node are successive layers of taxonomic ranks, from phylum to genus, mapping hundreds of eggplant varieties from around the world onto a single sheet. Studying common vegetables such as eggplants and tomatoes has been her life’s work.
Before chayote became the go-to crop, Rong Yan experimented with a wide variety of vegetables. She has a keen instinct for what tastes good, is easy to cultivate, and sells well; as a seasoned local grower, her practical knowledge rivals that of any agricultural specialist. Yet she remains resolute in her decision to focus on chayote seedlings. Growing this particular crop, she insists, is the only way “farmers will see a real return.”
V. A Path Forward: Returning to Diverse Cropping?
Chayote is a thirsty crop. To use water more efficiently, some of the village’s younger residents have fitted the fields with spray and drip irrigation systems. Yet how large an industry for chayote seedlings can the local water supply realistically sustain? Nobody has an answer.
The day we headed out to the village, a light drizzle fell. But it barely dampened the topsoil, offering little help to the farming cycle. With the spring equinox a month away and maize planting season approaching, Rong Yan worries whether the soil will be ready. The farmers are simply waiting for proper rain.
Yet excessive rainfall poses its own problems. Some growers have strung thin ropes across the canopy, ready to drape rain shelters over the plants if the downpours persist. Naturally, this only offers protection up to a certain point. During the prolonged flooding in the first half of last year, no amount of preparation made any difference.
These trials will take place at Rong Yan’s seed multiplication plot this year. Shanggutuan Village has shifted from an era of diverse cropping to one dominated by a single vegetable. Throughout this transition, the Farmers’ Seed Network has maintained that agricultural resilience is fundamentally rooted in the diversity of genetic resources.
Consequently, Song Xin, coordinator for the Farmers’ Seed Network’s Guangxi office, explains that the next step is to work alongside farmers to restore local cropping diversity. The aim is to safeguard the chayote sector while simultaneously introducing a broader range of stress-tolerant varieties.
They also hope this approach will yield additional ecological benefits, such as the natural soil nitrogen fixation provided by legumes. By pairing crops with different root depths—such as interplanting chayote with sweet potatoes—they aim to mitigate and distribute the impact of rodent damage.
In early March, the Farmers’ Seed Network hosted scientists, visiting growers, and NGO representatives in Shanggutuan Village for a series of field workshops. Wei Chang, an ecological farmer from Fuzhou, shared practical strategies for managing field pests in maize and vegetable crops, drawing strong approval from local growers across Guangxi. Song Xin believes it is vital to establish regular channels for these seasoned local practitioners to exchange knowledge, enabling different communities to share their experiences and learn from one another.
The collaborative model bringing together farmers, NGOs, and scientists continues to evolve. Yet Rong Yan, who has just turned sixty, harbours her own anxieties. Feeling her age, she wishes to pass the ecological cooperative into younger hands. Over the past few years, as the chayote seedling market boomed, young people flocked back to the village to seize the opportunity. But following each natural disaster, many packed their bags and left once more for urban factory work.
The sky, the soil, the crops, the people—what, ultimately, can we truly rely on?
Unless otherwise stated, all images in this article were photographed by Foodthink.
Editor: Ze En