The Hottest Summer, the Coldest Lychee Season: How Can Lychee Farmers Face a Super Off-Year?

I. Annihilation-Level Yield Loss: Lychees Face a “Super Off-Year”

Conghua District in Guangzhou is one of Guangdong’s principal lychee-growing areas. July is when the local lychees ripen, yet scenes once taken for granted are vanishing — where branches were once heavy with fruit and the tips sagged under the weight, all that remains is a canopy of vivid green leaves, and only up close can one spot a sparse scattering of red fruit on a handful of trees; the roadside stalls that used to sell lychees along the highway have disappeared without a trace.

● Fruit set on lychee trees in Yinlin Village, early July.

“Last year we couldn’t pick the lychees fast enough — the ones up on the hill, there simply wasn’t time, and over a thousand jin just rotted on the trees.” Sister Hu and her family are lifelong lychee farmers from Yinlin Village, Taiping Town, Conghua, with over 400 lychee trees. Since 2018, Sister Hu and her husband have kept bees, and even though most of their attention goes to the hives and relatively little to the lychee orchard, they still harvested over 8,000 jin of lychees last year.

But this year, “we haven’t even got a hundred jin — there’s simply nothing to sell,” Sister Hu says. The quality of what little was picked is far from satisfactory; she set aside some of the better-looking fruit for relatives and friends, and the rest is left for the family to eat. “Some buyers ring up to place orders, and all I can do is explain that there really are no lychees this year.”

● Last year’s fruit set on Sister Hu’s trees, courtesy of Sister Hu.

Yinlin Village in Taiping Town, Conghua, sits on flat land and has grown lychees on a large scale since the 1980s. This year, a yield collapse long foreshadowed swept through the entire village.

“It’s not just my orchard. Every household in our village has taken a massive hit. When the big picture looks like this, what can you do? We farmers live by the weather — there’s nothing we can do about it.” Sister Hu stands in the lychee grove, spreads her arms wide, and resigns herself to the reality of whole orchards bearing nothing at all.

Not far away, her husband is running a beekeeping experience for visiting consumers, explaining how honey is made. “In a normal year, who has time for this at this season? You’d be up at five in the morning picking lychees, picking until dark.”

To the east of Yinlin Village, the situation at Pengcheng Ecological Farm is worse still.

Across the farm’s twenty mu (around 3.3 acres) of orchard, with over two hundred lychee trees, they managed to pick “a dozen or so lychees — and that’s it.” Pengcheng Ecological Farm’s 2024 crop was a near-total failure.

Last year, when the lychees were ripe and the work overwhelmed them, Pengcheng and his wife Huahua had invited village friends to help pick. “Last year wasn’t exactly a bumper crop either — just over 800 jin in total. At thirty yuan a jin, we made over 24,000 yuan.” Going back further, in 2022 the farm had harvested close to 3,000 jin, earning over 50,000 yuan.

● Pengcheng Ecological Farm’s lychee orchard in July this year.

As far as Pengcheng knows, two other ecological lychee farms in Guangdong also suffered total crop failures. Whether conventional cultivation or ecological cultivation, orchards big and small have all faced severe yield losses.

“Normally you’d pick a hundred jin in an hour. Now it takes three.” Mr Luo of the Mincheng Planting Cooperative in Yinlin Village, watching the poor fruit set rate and inconsistent quality, is bleak about this year’s output: “Conghua’s lychee yield this year is down at least eighty percent.”

Mincheng Cooperative’s core business is dried lychee processing, alongside acting as a sales agent for farmers’ fresh fruit. Its raw material comes from 600 mu of self-owned orchards and purchases from local growers, but this year the orchard harvest came to barely 6,000-plus jin (last year: 60,000 jin — a ninety percent drop from the orchard alone). Adding the lychees collected from farmers, the total is around 50,000 jin. Even though Mincheng has far greater production and sales capacity than smallholder farmers, the decline against last year’s total of 170,000 jin reaches seventy percent. Mr Luo is blunt: “With output this low and purchase prices this high, making dried lychee simply isn’t worthwhile.”

● Yield figures gathered during the 7 July interview. Differences in orchard management practices, lychee varieties, and the number of trees per farm mean yields vary considerably from one grower to another; overall, however, the reduction exceeds eighty percent across the board.

As early as two months ago, the National Lychee and Longan Industry Technical System forecast that national lychee production in 2024 would fall by more than fifty percent. The projection read: “By variety, mid- and late-ripening cultivars such as Heiye, Huaizhi, Guiwei, Nuomizi and Jizuili are expected to see yield losses of 60 to 80 percent.”

Conghua is a major growing area for these mid- and late-ripening varieties. According to officially published figures, the district has 300,000 mu of lychee plantings, accounting for 7.3 percent of Guangdong Province and 52.1 percent of Guangzhou City. Harvest is concentrated from late June to early August, making Conghua the latest-ripening lychee-growing area in Guangdong, and its annual output accounts for over forty percent of Guangzhou’s total. Official data puts Conghua’s projected lychee yield for this year at approximately 31,000 tonnes, compared with 60,000 tonnes last year.

II. Prices Soar, Yet Farmers Still “Work a Year for Nothing”

The cliff-edge yield loss has driven lychee market prices up three to five times over.

At 6.40 a.m. at the Shengang Lychee Temporary Trading Centre, farmers from the surrounding villages arrive on motorbikes laden with lychees. This is one of Conghua District’s designated lychee trading points.

● 7 July, Shengang Lychee Temporary Trading Centre, Conghua.

“How much?” “Ten yuan.” The exchange between buyer and seller is brisk and to the point. The farmer parks the motorbike to one side; the buyer hauls the chosen lychees off the back, thrusts both hands into the basket and rummages through the fruit buried underneath.

“Eight yuan, then.” “Can’t do it, nine at the lowest.” A single yuan’s difference, and the two go back and forth for nearly ten minutes. The farmer won’t budge. The buyer turns to leave, hesitates, and in the end comes back, buying the farmer’s two baskets of Jingganghong (a Conghua-bred variety, a type of Nuomizi) at nine yuan a jin.

More farmers keep arriving on motorbikes, each carrying a basket or two of lychees. They find a clear patch of ground, park, and wait for buyers to come and inspect. Even in the early morning, standing under Guangzhou’s July sun is like being grilled; buyers and farmers alike are drenched in sweat. After an hour, many farmers’ lychees remain unsold. “In the old days, they’d be snapped up the moment they arrived.”

● The Shengang Lychee Temporary Trading Centre is a key lychee trading venue in Conghua.

With lychee yields falling across the board, early-ripening varieties caused a stir when they first hit the market in May, commanding over 100 yuan a jin — a price few consumers could have imagined. By early July, retail prices had begun to ease. “In mid-to-late June, the purchase price for our Guiwei hit seventy or eighty yuan a jin. Now it’s come down to twenty or thirty,” says a young man at the trading centre who has come to help his parents sell their crop. Their harvest is done — today is the last basket.

In early July at the Shengang Lychee Temporary Trading Centre, good-quality Nuomizi fetches over 20 yuan a jin at the purchase price, while middling fruit sits between 10 and 20 yuan; Guiwei commands a little more — though the fruit is generally on the small side, buyers are paying between 20 and 35 yuan. These two market favourites are rarely seen in quantity; what dominates the scene are Huaizhi, a local heritage variety, and Jingganghong, a newer cultivar bred some years ago — their purchase prices ranging from 5 to 15 yuan a jin depending on appearance.

These prices are far above anything seen in previous years. Sister Hu in Yinlin Village and Mr Luo, head of Mincheng, both confirm that Huaizhi retailed for just two or three yuan a jin last year — at today’s prices, you still can’t get any stock.

Yet despite the sharp drop in output, the predicted shortage never materialised. “You must have seen it at Shengang — those farmers’ lychees sit there for ages and nobody comes to buy them. Same for mine. What I collected from growers this morning still hadn’t sold by three or four o’clock.” Mr Luo has posted a dedicated observer at the market to monitor conditions.

● The quality of lychees on display at the trading centre.

But even a steep rise in prices can barely make up for what the yield collapse has taken. For many lychee farmers, it amounts to a whole year’s work for nothing.

Sister Hu’s family sold just over 8,000 jin of lychees last year for more than 80,000 yuan. In a normal year — whether off-year or bumper — the lychee crop brought in at least 50,000 yuan. This year’s harvest of barely 100 jin won’t even cover the cost of inputs.

Mr Li, a local ride-hailing driver with over 60 lychee trees at home, tends his orchard carefully every year. Last year he harvested over 5,000 jin and sold them for more than 40,000 yuan. This year, after picking every last fruit, he had just over 300 jin, which fetched a little more than 10,000 yuan. After deducting over 4,000 yuan spent on pesticides and chemical fertilizers, he is left with roughly 6,000 yuan.

“Most of the people still growing lychees are over fifty. A year’s crop brings in thirty or forty thousand yuan, which keeps a family going in the countryside. But this year there’s nothing. A lot of folks in our village haven’t even got back the money they spent on pesticides and fertilizers.” Mr Li sighs. “We farmers just live by the weather.”

III. The Climate Crisis: What Can Ecological Cultivation Do?

In the first half of this year, rain in Guangzhou fell relentlessly from before Qingming through mid-to-late June. According to meteorological records, between 17 April and 7 June — a span of 52 days — only seven saw no rainfall. Conghua alone received 923.6 mm in April, 301 percent above the norm for that period.

● Rainfall distribution during Guangzhou’s April–June wet season, published on the Weibo account “Guangdong Weather”, 8 June.

The farmers we spoke to broadly agreed that this year’s yield collapse was due to two things: a natural off-year cycle for lychees, and the weather — “too much rain”. This echoes the official line from Conghua: “Affected by the weather, our district’s lychee output has suffered this year, and the off-year decline is particularly pronounced.”

“Lychees do have an alternating cycle of big and small years, but I don’t think that’s the whole story this year,” Sister Hu says, drawing on years of growing experience. “Lychees need the right climate to grow properly. Last winter in Guangdong simply wasn’t cold enough. After the autumn flush, the trees failed to push out flower buds. Then the rain just wouldn’t stop. If it hadn’t rained so much, I reckon my orchard would still have put up around 1,000 jin — it wouldn’t have dropped below even 100. But the rain kept coming, the fruit turned yellow when it was no bigger than a finger, and then they dropped in droves.”

● Early May: the young fruit set coincides with Guangzhou’s rainy season. Photo courtesy of Mr Luo of Mincheng.

Lychee growth passes through three phases: the shoot-growth phase, the cold-induction phase, and the flowering and fruit-set phase. During the cold-induction phase, temperatures must remain below 10°C for at least 180 hours to trigger the tree’s reproductive growth and secure a normal flowering rate. But Guangzhou has been battered by a warm winter, a late-spring cold snap, and relentless rainfall since last winter — a devastating blow to the latter two growth phases.

Pengcheng had already sensed the coming collapse back in the spring. “If heaven doesn’t give you a crop, that’s that — there’s no ‘loss’ to speak of.” His lychee income is nil, yet he has no wish to linger on the word “total failure”. “This year’s yield drop is largely down to the climate, but cultivation practices play a part too. With good management, you can soften the impact of climate change to some degree.”

Pengcheng set about reshaping the trees. “In general, we think of a plant’s growth in two directions: vegetative growth and reproductive growth. Lychee trees are typically dome-shaped. I realised that this form tends to push too much energy into vegetative growth, so the tree just grows wood and never flowers or sets fruit.”

“So I ran a little experiment.” Pengcheng gave several dome-shaped trees a bold, drastic prune. Now they look rather bare, with only a handful of vertical branches and a few horizontal ones left. “I’m keeping one dominant leader trunk, because it’s the most vigorous. Look — there’s a horizontal branch for every direction, with a clear pecking order. When the main branches grow tall enough, I’ll pull them down.”

● Lychee trees at Pengcheng Ecological Farm after reshaping.

The idea is to sharpen the divide between vegetative and reproductive growth — vertical branches handle vegetative growth, horizontal branches handle reproductive growth. “Apples, pears, cherries — these fruit trees have already proved it’s the right way. Applying it to lychees, I’m not sure I’ve got it right yet.”

Long before hormones entered fruit-tree cultivation, conventional lychee growers already practised branch-pulling. After this round of pruning, the trees can be shaped by bending and tying branches as they grow, without cutting them again. “I’d rather work with nature and minimise interference with the tree’s own energy.”

In the past, when the climate was mild and extremes rare, dome-shaped lychee trees could balance vegetative and reproductive growth on their own. Now Pengcheng is resolutely reshaping the whole orchard towards a central-leader form, an idea that thrilled him for weeks. “I’ve been doing ecological farming for ten years, and looking back, I’m still a beginner.” Yet he also feels this could prove a breakthrough year.

Pengcheng has planted several dozen new guava saplings this year. “Guava is fairly resilient to heat and humidity. With the climate hitting lychees so hard, the farm needs a more stable source of income.”

IV. Climate and Economy: The Double Bind Facing Lychee Farmers

Crops are the first to register a shifting climate. The phrase farmers have always lived by — “we live by the weather” — takes on a sharper, more ominous meaning in the face of climate crisis, laying bare humanity’s dependence on the natural world and the threats woven into it.

In a media interview back in May, Professor Chen Houbin of South China Agricultural University observed, “In the future, lychee management may need to treat every year as an off-year.”

“Climate change is a global problem, yet it is also happening right here on our doorstep. How do we, as individuals, respond to something so vast?” Qiūqiū, a new villager who has lived in Yinlin for years, took that question and, together with fellow newcomers who have moved into the village over the years, put on a Lychee Festival. Unlike last year’s celebration of a bumper crop, this year’s was a “Lychee Festival without lychees”.

● A lychee-themed exhibition at the Yinlin Lychee Festival.

● The community dialogue at the Yinlin Lychee Festival. Photography: Binghuang

Why are there no lychees this year? Climate change has become the core focus of this year’s Lychee Festival. At a community dialogue session, Sister Juan, a senior engineer at the Guangdong Meteorological Bureau, shared the changes and trends that Guangdong’s climate has undergone over the past twenty years. “My colleagues have run the numbers — since 2000, the number of hot days in Guangzhou has risen sharply, and rainfall extremes have become ever more pronounced.”

Two days later, the Conghua District Government held its own Lychee Festival in Taiping Town. Unlike the motivation behind Yinlin Village’s new residents’ festival, this one was primarily about attracting investment, building momentum for Conghua’s lychees, and finding new sales channels.

On one side, community groups spontaneously organised a Lychee Festival, hoping that more people would understand the concrete impact macro-level climate change has on lychee production; on the other, the government staged a Lychee Festival to court investors, with its eyes fixed on the fruit’s commercial prospects. Falling output, stalled sales — production on one side, marketing on the other — lay bare the genuine dilemma lychee farmers face this year.

– History of Lychee Cultivation in Conghua –

◉ Before 1949, the total lychee-growing area across Conghua exceeded 10,000 mu, making it one of the district’s farmers’ principal sources of income;

◉ In 1978, a planting boom swept through Conghua’s countryside. By November 1981, lychee-growing area had reached 22,000 mu, and Conghua was listed as one of seven national key lychee counties;

◉ In 1996, lychee area grew to 109,000 mu, and the State Council’s Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Husbandry and Fisheries approved Conghua as a national lychee production base (city-county);

◉ In 2004, lychee area expanded to 236,700 mu;

◉ Today, Conghua has approximately 300,000 mu of lychee orchards, nearly 40 lychee varieties, and over 300,000 lychee growers across the district.

References

Lychee data:

1. National Lychee and Longan Industry R&D Centre: “2024 National Lychee Production Analysis and Management Recommendations”

http://www.farmchina.org.cn/controlpanel/eWebEditor/uploadfile/file/20240618/20240618020739_45914.pdf

2. China Newsweek: “This Year’s Lychees — ‘Be Grateful if You Can Get Any at All'”

https://www.inewsweek.cn/finance/2024-05-20/22053.shtml

3. Conghua District Media Convergence Centre: “Conghua District Launches the 2024 Guangzhou Lychee Marketing Promotion and Conghua Lychee Festival”

https://www.gz.gov.cn/ysgz/xwdt/ysdt/tpxw/content/post_9726645.html

4. Conghua District Media Convergence Centre: “2024 Guangzhou Conghua Lychee Festival | ‘Lychee as the Medium’ — Harvesting Results from Industry Investment under the Hundred-Thousand-Ten Thousand Project”

http://www.conghua.gov.cn/ztzlbqwgcchfc/content/post_9749744.html

5. Guangzhou Conghua Release: “Lychee Lovers, Look Here! Follow This Map to Meet the Finest Lychees in Conghua”

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/pyxVKq6NME4Pg7n4lUfBdA

6. Guangzhou Conghua Release: “Conghua’s Lychee Heritage Runs Deep — Come and Hear Its Story”

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/M1CEwitc9OjNylnxBA6Skg

7. WeChat account “Yinlin Ecological Living”: “Where Have the Lychees Gone? | 6–7 July: The Yinlin Lychee Festival Awaits You”

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/DcbrvupPBbpLmy91i-5Vtg

Meteorological data:

Southern Daily: “Only 7 Rain-Free Days in 52 for Guangzhou — When Will the Sun Get Back to Work?”

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ePtppzrFUJrEjpTbP48ngw

Guangzhou City Agricultural Meteorological Monthly Report, November 2023

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/lmnuWWFRb84VOGpRVaydWQ