Chayote Shoots’ Breakout: Climate, Seeds and the County Crop Boom
I. Chayote Seeds: A “Chokehold”
In 2024, Guangxi experienced several episodes of extreme rainfall. In Mashan specifically, prolonged rain caused severe waterlogging in the first half of the year; all the chayotes rotted in the flooded fields. Once the rainy season ended, farmers rushed to buy seed fruit from other regions, only to be hit by a devastating drought in the second half. From last year’s National Day holiday to this year’s Spring Festival, not a single drop of rain fell. Young plants need a great deal of water, and most of the seed fruit bought at inflated prices withered and died in the ground.
It was not just the chayotes – even drinking water became a crisis. The public swimming pool in Shang Gula Village, Guzhai, hit rock bottom for the first time in forty years. The government dispatched fire engines to deliver water to villagers. During the Spring Festival, people could not even take a bath. Falling groundwater levels and subsiding house foundations sent cracks running through the walls.
Guzhai, Mashan, lies about two hours’ drive north of Nanning and has always had a relatively dry climate. Farmers mulch their ridges with maize straw to retain soil moisture; once the straw decomposes, it acts as fertiliser. But last year’s drought was so fierce that even the straw could not break down.
As an old agricultural proverb puts it: drought breeds insects, dampness breeds disease. The widely planted maize fell victim to unusually ferocious pests and blight. Locals said, ‘They ate everything down to the stalks.’
In late February, we visited Shang Gula Village, Guzhai, Mashan. Lu Rongyan, head of the Rongyan Ecological Farming and Breeding Cooperative in Mashan County, furrowed her brow at the mere mention of chayotes. Growing chayote shoots differs from growing ordinary vegetables: you must plant with fresh seed fruit, and if the seed fruit fails entirely, your only option is to buy more from the market. ‘The latest batch of chayotes was ordered from Guizhou on 9 February, but by 20 February they still hadn’t shipped. There’s nothing you can do but wait anxiously.’
Based on planting 1,000 seed fruit per mu (approx. 667 m²), a healthy seed fruit often weighs over 1 jin (500 g). With the price of chayote now risen to ¥1.2 per jin, the seed fruit cost alone for one mu works out at ¥1,200–1,500.
Rongyan was the first person in Mashan to grow and sell chayote shoots, and she witnessed, step by step, how local farmers fell under the “chokehold” of outside middlemen. When they first started buying seed fruit from Yunnan and Guizhou, prices were relatively low and the arrangement was deposit-based. Now that seed fruit is in such demand, the Guizhou supplier Rongyan deals with has escalated to demanding full payment in advance.
In October 2024, perhaps because the seed fruit had not been fully mature, half of what arrived from elsewhere had already rotted. The seed fruit bought again in January 2025 was affected by cold temperatures, and germination rates were very low. The farmers had no choice – they had to keep buying from the Guizhou middlemen and endure the steadily rising prices.
II. How Chayote Shoots Burst onto the Scene
In the 1990s, Dr Song Yiqing at the Centre for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences, was conducting a germplasm-resource assessment of maize when she noticed that the spread of commercial hybrids was causing local maize varieties across Guangxi and three other south-western provinces to degenerate and disappear. She set about bringing researchers and farmers together in participatory plant breeding, working side by side in the fields to collect, purify, rejuvenate and preserve local varieties.
Just as scientists were noticing the rapid loss of farmer-saved varieties, Rongyan was discovering the same problem in her own farming life. Villagers had been swapping local heirloom varieties for hybrids to chase higher yields, but that came with a dependency on chemical fertiliser, pesticides and agro-input companies. Excessive chemical inputs were also degrading the soil and destabilising the varieties.
By contrast, the taller, traditional local varieties were harder to manage and lower-yielding, but they tasted better and suffered fewer pests and diseases.
From 2000 onwards, Rongyan, then in her early thirties, began working with experts from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Guangxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences. She led ten farming households in forming a participatory plant-breeding group, undertaking breeding and seed saving for the vanishing local maize and vegetable varieties, and established a community seed bank.
They found that saving their own seed could cut costs on purchased seed, chemical fertiliser and pesticides, while benefiting soil health and food safety. At the same time, the culinary and cultural memories bound up in the seeds were kept alive. The work also revitalised community organisation: in an era when young and able-bodied villagers had left en masse for migrant jobs, it gave the elderly and women who remained a renewed sense of attachment to and confidence in rural life.
This community seed bank was not an isolated case. In 2013, Dr Song Yiqing founded the charitable organisation Farmers’ Seed Network to support rural communities across China in selecting and preserving farmer-saved varieties – keeping seed diversity in the hands of the farming communities themselves.
Armed with a rich local germplasm-resource base, Rongyan took a further leap forward, leading 27 elderly and women members to establish the Rongyan Ecological Farming and Breeding Cooperative and turning to ecological agriculture. To grow safe, healthy produce, the cooperative uses no pesticides or chemical fertiliser, and its free-range heritage pigs and chickens are raised on additive-free feed.
But who would buy the produce? Around that time, Tusheng Liangpin had just opened in Nanning – one of China’s earliest Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) restaurants. Tusheng Liangpin sourced its ingredients from small-scale ecological farmers nearby, and Rongyan was among them.
Supplying a restaurant meant guaranteeing a stable supply – a world away from hauling a basket of vegetables to set up a market stall.
To meet the restaurant’s purchasing demands, the cooperative worked hard to broaden both the range and the volume of vegetables and meat. They set up a five-mu breeding base for local varieties and ran comparative trials across upland and lowland soils and microclimates to maintain quality control.
Just as things were picking up, though, the Nanning branch of Tusheng Liangpin shut down due to lack of custom. Rongyan learned another hard lesson: a single sales channel is a risk.
She began exploring other avenues for ecological agricultural produce around Mashan County – the Nanning Urban Farmers’ Market, community group-buying circles…… To open up markets, the cooperative trialled many promising varieties, such as the sweet-and-sour, juicy “Mao Xiucai” tomato and luffa (sponge gourd). The Farmers’ Seed Network also supported their attempts to domesticate wild greens, such as red amaranth and goji leaves, but sales remained poor.
Thankfully they had always been conserving heirloom varieties. If one didn’t work, they tried another. That is how they stumbled upon chayote shoots.
No one can say exactly when the chayote first reached Mashan. In Rongyan’s memory, it has always been a local crop. It was just that villagers used to eat the fruit and ignore the shoots; picking shoots for the table only began in 2013. In Guangxi, chayote shoots are also called “Dragon’s Whiskers”, a name drawn from the way the young tendrils curl delicately, like the whiskers of a dragon. They have a fresh, crisp, tender bite and can be stir-fried, dressed in a cold salad, or dipped into a hotpot.
Rongyan loves chayotes because they thrive on farmyard manure; chemical fertiliser actually causes root rot. They are not particularly prone to pests or disease either – snails are the most common pest, and can be controlled with tea seed cake. In short, the chayote is perfectly suited to ecological farming, which aligns with Rongyan’s approach to production.
In 2014–2015, to open up the market, Rongyan mobilised the actors from the village amateur drama troupe and the cooperative’s managers to go out each month to the Nanning Urban Farmers’ Market and Mama Group activity venues to spread the word, performing the Intangible Cultural Heritage ethnic dance “Da Lang” to draw in customers. They also set up stalls at farmers’ markets across Nanning, giving free chayote shoots to selected vendors to help promote the crop.
Gradually, chayote shoots broke into the Nanning market and became the cooperative’s star product.
III. Chayote Shoots Revitalise the Countryside
Before 2017, chayote cultivation in the area was small-scale and easy to manage. A chayote plant can live for three to five years, and with proper water and fertiliser management, a farmer can pick 50 jin of shoots every day or two from one mu of land. At a farmgate price of ¥2 per jin, that works out to ¥100 a day. Shoots can be harvested from February to November, and the inputs are minimal – no machinery, pesticides or chemical fertiliser are needed. Simply go to the field each day to pick a basketful, carry the bamboo basket to the cooperative on your back, and it is weighed and paid for on the spot. It is ideally suited to elderly and female farmers who find it hard to leave home for migrant work.
Mashan County sits on typical karst terrain where the surface retains no water – locals call it “nine parts stone, one part soil”. For generations, farmers have eked out a living growing maize in the crevices between rocks. Most of the young and able-bodied have long since left for migrant jobs elsewhere. During the agricultural off-season, the elderly sit beneath street-facing eaves making handmade hair ornaments, earning no more than ten or twenty yuan a day.
By contrast, growing chayote shoots requires little investment, offers high returns and carries minimal risk. That is why the older women were the first to take it up. Most of them had gone all their lives without a single penny of pocket money to call their own; now, by planting chayotes and picking shoots, they could earn money straight away. That small measure of freely disposable income gave them an unprecedented sense of independence.
Chayote shoots are at their best when fresh. Once picked, they need to reach the market as quickly as possible to command a good price. To catch the first bus to the county town at seven o’clock sharp, farmers must be in the fields by three or four in the morning – a time when snakes are a common hazard.
In 2019, the cooperative secured a government loan to build cold storage and buy a refrigerated truck. That eased things on the production side. Farmers could now pick shoots after moonrise; by midnight the cooperative had loaded the truck, and the shoots were dispatched first thing in the morning to the vegetable distribution centre.
Farming households in neighbouring villages and towns quickly followed suit. The township government made chayote shoots a key lever for rural revitalisation, introducing incentive policies and running training courses to spark local enthusiasm for growing the crop.
In just five years, chayote cultivation across the township expanded from 300 mu to 2,000 mu. Chayote shoots delivered one income-generating miracle after another. According to local media reports, take neighbouring Gujin Village –
Villager B stays home looking after her grandchild, devoting all two mu of her land to chayote shoots. This year alone, picking and selling shoots has brought in over ¥10,000. On one particular day she earned ¥359 on her own – a personal income record for the village.
By October 2023, according to a Guangxi News report, all nine villages in the township were growing chayote shoots, generating a combined output value of ¥7 million – over ¥5,000 in income per mu per year. The township’s chayote shoots now command 80% of the equivalent vegetable category under Nanning’s Vegetable Basket programme.
Today, Guzhai Yao Ethnic Township alone has five chayote cooperatives. It is said that the up-and-comers drive alongside Rongyan’s delivery truck into the city to spy on which customers are buying chayote shoots, then go out to the fields to intercept farmers and insist they sell their shoots to them.
‘There are far too many bosses these past two years,’ says Rongyan. By ‘bosses’ she means these newly established cooperatives. On paper the farmers are members of a cooperative, but there seem to be no clearly defined rights or obligations among them. ‘Whoever pays more and whoever he knows better – that is who he gives his shoots to. But he doesn’t want to offend anyone either, so he gives a little to every boss.’
Competition has forced the ‘bosses’ to raise their game. As of October 2022, Guzhai Yao Ethnic Township had built six cold storage facilities with a combined capacity exceeding 400 cubic metres, plus two refrigerated trucks on standby. Surrounding townships were setting up their own cooperatives too, and village and township cadres were rallying wholeheartedly behind chayote shoot production. According to Nanning News Online, in 2024 the First Secretary of Dalu Village in Mashan County self-funded a 40% subsidy on every shoot, and ‘over 20,000 chayote shoots have now been subsidised in total.’
After losing the Nanning market, Rongyan shifted her shoots to Foshan and Shenzhen. Cantonese buyers scrutinise appearance – the shoots must be vivid green and look beautiful. For every ten jin the cooperative accepts, four jin have to be discarded, and at ten yuan an hour they must also pay pickers extra just to do the job.
Rongyan is not the only one thinking this way. Every single ‘boss’ is desperately trying to hoover up shoots.
Last year’s poor harvest tightened supply, and the farmgate price briefly rose to ¥3 per jin. But some young people who had stayed in the village to grow chayote shoots, having weathered the flood and then the drought in one devastating year, grew disheartened and went back to the cities for migrant jobs. Even Rongyan’s eldest son gave up on chayote shoots and left to find work elsewhere.
IV. Seed Conservation or a Switch of Varieties?
Even with the help of the Farmers’ Seed Network, villagers have grown proficient at seed conservation and breeding, but for the chayote – a vegetable with such unusual reproductive biology – no seed saving plan has yet been put in place.
“If a natural disaster strikes, seed prices are certain to shoot up the following year, so you have to cultivate a mindset of preparedness.” Li Wenjia, a researcher at the Vegetable Research Institute of the Guangxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences, offers this reminder.
Invited by the Farmers’ Seed Network, Li Wenjia joined this field visit. Her advice on how to save chayote seed is remarkably simple – you might even call it common sense: farmers need a disaster-awareness mentality, setting aside enough seed fruit for the year ahead.
As for how much to save, it boils down to a simple piece of arithmetic – if you plant 1,000 seed fruit per mu and each vine bears at least ten fruits, then set aside one-tenth of a mu for seed saving. Those 100 plants on that small plot can yield harvestable shoots for sale in the early stage, while in the later stage you let the vines fruit to produce seed fruit for the following year. That way you secure your own seed supply and avoid being left at someone else’s mercy – another “chokehold.”
If a catastrophe like the one in 2024 were to recur, the best strategy for a household is to devote every available drop of water to seed conservation. Provided they survive the dry season, and the following year brings normal weather, production can carry on as usual. Some farmers in the area have already done precisely that. After the disaster year, they were even able to sell surplus seed fruit to their neighbours.
The Farmers’ Seed Network supports rural communities across the country in building seed banks, exchanging seeds among themselves to broaden the gene pool of farmer-saved varieties. At the end of last year, upon learning of Mashan’s chayote crisis, Shitou Cheng Village in Lijiang, Yunnan – part of the same network – urgently donated a batch of chayote seed fruit. But because of the long journey, by the time the fruit reached Mashan many of the tiny shoots pushing from the base of each fruit had already dried out, resulting in a low seedling establishment rate for this consignment.
Learning hard from hard pain, the conclusion is inescapable: they have to rely on themselves.
Rongyan has tried raising shoots through propagation by cuttings from the vines, but the results have been disappointing – either the cuttings rot at the base, or the shoots that do emerge are painfully frail. In short, at present no method better than the seed fruit itself has been found.
This year, Rongyan leased another 60 mu of land in a neighbouring village to serve as a chayote breeding base. She chose the neighbouring village because it sits deeper in the hills, where water sources are slightly better. Finding a plot like this is no easy feat – it has to be safe from drought and flood alike, and also safe from animals. Macaques frequently raid the maize, and they hold grudges; villagers dare not provoke them lightly and will not retaliate even when the monkeys have stripped the crop.
Suppose Mashan’s farmers do succeed in seed saving and escape the “chokehold” – what then, when the next flood or drought strikes?
This is no groundless worry. Earlier this year, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record, with global temperatures standing 1.55 °C above pre-industrial levels – already past the critical 1.5 °C threshold. That means the impacts of climate change are growing ever more visible, and the risks of floods, drought, pests, disease and heatwaves are set to climb higher still. And in the end, all of it falls on the shoulders of farmers.
If droughts and floods become more and more frequent, could they switch to varieties with greater climate resilience?
Pinned to the bookshelf in researcher Li Wenjia’s office are two enormous phylogenetic trees of aubergine species. Radiating outward from a single root node, one taxonomic rank after another – from phylum to genus – unfurls across the page, bringing together several hundred aubergine species from around the world. Researching aubergines, tomatoes and other everyday vegetables has been her life’s work.
Long before chayote shoots burst onto the scene, Rongyan had already trialled all manner of vegetables. Which varieties taste good, grow well and sell well – as a home-grown “folk expert”, her experience arguably matches that of any professional vegetable researcher. And Rongyan remains steadfast: it has to be chayote shoots. Only by growing these can “farmers actually put money in their pockets.”
V. A Way Forward: Restoring Diversified Cropping?
Chayotes are thirsty plants. To use water more efficiently, some of the younger villagers have installed sprinkler and drip irrigation systems in their chayote fields. But how large a chayote shoot industry can the local water supply actually sustain? No one has an answer to that question.
On the day we went down to the village, a light drizzle was falling. But that drizzle could barely dampen the surface of the soil – of no real use for farming. Rongyan said that in another month it would be the Spring Equinox, the time to plant maize, and she worried about whether there would be enough moisture to sow at all. The farmers were all waiting for rain.
Too much rain is just as bad. Some households have strung fine wire above their chayote beds; if the rain drags on too long, they pull a rain shelter over the plants. Of course, that can only guard against rainfall up to a certain threshold. A prolonged deluge like the one in the first half of last year – nothing you do can help then.
These trials will take place at Rongyan’s breeding base this year. Shang Gula Village has travelled from early days of diversified planting to a situation where the chayote reigns supreme, yet the Farmers’ Seed Network has always held that agricultural resilience lies in the diversity of germplasm resources.
And so, says Song Xin, coordinator of the Farmers’ Seed Network’s Guangxi office, the next step is to work with farmers to rebuild local crop diversity through diversified planting – safeguarding the chayote while introducing more varieties with greater stress tolerance.
They hope this approach will bring other benefits too: the nitrogen-fixation benefits of leguminous plants, for example, and pairing deep- and shallow-rooted crops, such as intercropping sweet potatoes among the chayote plants, to spread the risk of rodent damage.
In early March, the Farmers’ Seed Network invited scientists, farmers from other regions and NGO staff to Shang Gula Village for a field-based exchange. Wei Chang, an ecological farmer from Fuzhou, offered suggestions on managing pests in maize and vegetable fields, which the other Guangxi farmers found highly practical. Song Xin believes that a regular exchange mechanism should be built among “folk experts”, supporting communities in sharing experience and inspiring one another.
The collaboration among farmers, NGOs and scientists continues. But Rongyan, who has just turned sixty, is weighed down by a new thought. She feels she is getting old and wants to pass the ecological cooperative on to the young. In the years she has watched the chayote shoot boom take off, young people rushed back to snatch up the business; after the disasters, they dashed off again to find work in the cities.
Sky, soil, chayote, people – what, in the end, can truly be relied upon?
Unless otherwise stated, all images in this article were taken by Foodthink
Editor: Ze’en