Controlling the Crops, or Being Controlled by Them? Life Governed by Greenhouse Vegetables

Foodthink Says

During the targeted poverty alleviation drive, and in an effort to rapidly secure prosperity for the peasantry, the government of Gong County (pseudonym) introduced greenhouse vegetable cultivation, a venture with strong market returns. Subsidy schemes were rolled out in a bid to integrate this crop into the livelihood strategies of local households.

What, then, caused farmers to greet this initiative with such reluctance, despite the government providing greenhouses, seedlings, and technical guidance free of charge? And why did they continue to favour the white lotus, even though its returns are comparatively lower?

In yesterday’s article, Why Smallholders Are Reluctant to Grow Greenhouse Vegetables, Sang Kun dissected the holistic requirements greenhouse farming imposes on capital, technology, and labour. This article focuses instead on the ecological and social impacts of greenhouse vegetable production under intensive factor inputs, prompting a broader reflection on industrial development.

● Many of the greenhouses erected with such fervour in Gong County during the poverty alleviation campaign now lie unused. In 2022, Chen Village in the county even repurposed over 700 mu of these idle greenhouses as a nursery for rice seedlings.

I. Monocropping

Cultivating greenhouse vegetables demands significant investment, and the cost of trial and error is equally steep. Consequently, most producers tend to “follow the crowd”—opting for large-scale monocropping of whichever produce is most popular on the market, a practice that undeniably heightens the risk of pest and disease outbreaks. The market’s standardised expectations for taste, quality, and appearance further drive up the use of harmful chemicals such as pesticides.

A sensible greenhouse layout requires adequate spacing between structures. Yet in Gong County, greenhouses are densely packed onto limited tracts of flat land, which hinders growers’ overall development. Because “everyone has their own temperament and working habits,” farmers’ crop scheduling and rotation plans vary considerably. When such differing operations are crammed together in monoculture, cross-infection between cropping cycles becomes highly likely.

●Cropping succession refers to the overall arrangement of successive seasonal crops grown on the same plot and their order of replacement. The crop planted in the earlier season is termed the preceding crop, while the later one is the succeeding crop. Growers must understand these sequential characteristics to plan crop rotation effectively. The photograph shows a vegetable greenhouse during the transition between cropping cycles.

Take Chen Village, for example: both Chen Keli and Chen Chengren grow tomatoes, their greenhouses situated side by side. In June 2020, Chen Keli deemed market prices for tomatoes too low and, faced with successive disease outbreaks, used machinery to clear out his entire crop. Chen Chengren’s tomatoes, having been treated preventively, had initially remained disease-free. Yet once Chen Keli cleared his plants, pests from his greenhouse migrated across into Chen Chengren’s, leaving him no choice but to apply pesticides again.

Similarly, while certain agribusinesses employ biological pesticides that easily deter pests, neighbouring smallholders cannot afford such costlier biological options. As a result, pests driven out from the corporate greenhouses spill over into the farmers’ plots, forcing growers to increase their chemical dosage.

In truth, as local farmers will attest, “When only a few growers cultivate a wide expanse, it helps keep pests and diseases in check.” Moreover, traditional methods such as crop rotation and intercropping harness the natural checks and balances between crops to effectively manage pests and disease. For instance, the traditional tobacco–lotus–rice rotation can effectively prevent diseases sharing the same pathogenic sources, while planting a handful of runner beans within a greenhouse can help monitor and suppress powdery mildew. Yet within densely packed single-crop greenhouses, alterations to planting layouts and crop compositions render such traditional farming knowledge obsolete.

II.“The More You Grow, The More Disease You Breed”

Beyond the transmission of diseases, continuous high-intensity cultivation has also brought new pests and diseases, as well as soil contamination. During fieldwork in Chen Village with my team, local farmers widely reported that after four years of greenhouse vegetable cultivation, they had encountered pests and diseases previously unknown to the locality.

“Many diseases have appeared in our fields that the older generation has never heard of; even white lotus, rice, and tobacco leaves are affected. … I believe it’s because we’ve been growing greenhouse vegetables so intensively in recent years, planting continuously through the year. This causes infection to carry over between crop cycles and depletes certain trace elements in the soil, giving rise to new diseases. Some of these cannot be eradicated even with pesticides. The more you grow, the more disease and pests you breed.”

The heavy and frequent use of chemicals has also taken a direct toll on growers’ health. Lin Fuhui, a company director in Chen Village, said: “The temperature here is high year-round, making it even hotter inside the greenhouses. The workers are mostly older, most have high blood pressure, and those in weaker health simply cannot stand it. They say that breathing in the fumes from fertilisers and pesticides too often makes them feel dizzy.”

● Farmers inside the greenhouse preparing to spray pesticides, alongside the mixed pesticide.

Furthermore, some farmers observe that modern organic fertilisers bear little resemblance to those of the past. “The farmyard manure we used back then didn’t contain as much salt or hormones. But with today’s commercial fertilisers—even the granules you can buy at markets, composted from chicken and pig waste—once diluted with water, they still carry a heavy salt load. Simply rotating crops isn’t enough to leach it away.”

Clearly, while greenhouse vegetables, akin to Pandora’s box, yield certain economic returns, these financial gains do not automatically translate into equivalent social or ecological benefits. Instead, they impose adverse environmental impacts on local communities. In the long term, this undermines the sustainable use of land and hinders the green transition of China’s agricultural sector.

III. An Uncertain Market

In truth, these challenges are not insurmountable; capable farmers could overcome them with time and effort. After all, the substantial annual return of 20,000 to 30,000 yuan per mu for greenhouse vegetables is worth the gamble.

Yet another major plight facing Gong County’s greenhouse vegetable sector lies in the market itself.

Market volatility has repeatedly left growers in Gong County operating at a loss. Crop timing is their only real opportunity to secure a foothold in the market. The usual strategy is to anticipate when a particular vegetable will be in short supply or before it hits the market in large quantities, then fast-track seedling propagation, transplanting, and harvesting to capitalise on that narrow window.

Yet vegetable prices fluctuate unpredictably, with the same variety often fetching different rates within a single day. When widespread cultivation of a single cash crop is met with a sudden price collapse, even government-attracted enterprises are not spared from losing their entire investment.

To broaden distribution channels and mitigate market risks, the Gong County government has attempted to position the local vegetable industry as a vegetable supply base for the Greater Bay Area, aiming to link into consumer markets in major cities such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macau. However, only a handful of large-scale vegetable enterprises brought in through investment promotion truly meet the strict entry standards for supplying Hong Kong and Macau.

Initially, many farmers pinned their hopes on these companies, expecting them to handle sales on their behalf. However, due to disparities in field management, farming techniques, and access to quality seeds and agricultural inputs, the produce grown by households fails to meet the entry requirements for the Greater Bay Area. Even when companies act as distributors to fulfil policy-driven support mandates, they struggle to resolve the underlying issue of inconsistent quality control. Those farmers who miss out on the export boom to Hong Kong and Macau are left to find their own markets.

For smallholder farmers, one potential outlet is institutional purchasing: during the poverty alleviation campaign, certain township governments mobilised public institutions to buy vegetables directly from farmers as part of support initiatives. But with the campaign’s conclusion, this internal procurement market has dried up. Without established social networks, ordinary farmers find it nearly impossible to continue selling through this channel. Consequently, most greenhouse vegetable growers in Gong County have turned to local retail and wholesale markets instead.

● Farmers can certainly command higher prices by retailing at local markets, but sales volumes remain low and the work is labour-intensive.

Yet growers quickly realised that greenhouse vegetables offered little advantage in the local market.

Take eggplants as an example: locals prefer long purple varieties, whereas round eggplants are more popular in outside markets. Locals favour the pungent upward-growing chilies, but have little appetite for bell peppers or sweet peppers. Meanwhile, ingredients commonly used locally for meatballs and dumplings—such as apricot melon, sweet potato, and taro—can be grown open-air. Most households keep a small vegetable patch anyway, so there is no need to invest in greenhouses to control the growing conditions.

If farmers were to switch to varieties that match local tastes, their sales would be largely confined to the area. However, the local market’s limited purchasing power can only sustain a small number of vegetable growers. Those who enter first might reap the benefits, but latecomers would struggle to carve out any space, further squeezing profit margins.

IV. Life Dictated by the Crops

The only real advantage greenhouse vegetables offer growers is the ability to cultivate out of season. When winter arrives and smallholders who grow open-air vegetables enter their traditional off-season, greenhouse farmers hit their true peak cropping period—though this simply turns their own “quiet months” into a “busy season”.

Zhu Zhanjie, a 38-year-old farmer from Zhu Village, says: “Since I started greenhouse farming, even working from dawn till dusk, I’m inside the greenhouse almost all year round and have no time to look after my own children. Even cooking, getting the kids to and from school, and taking them to the hospital when they’re ill all fall on my parents. … The pay is certainly a bit better, but it’s just too grueling. It leaves you running yourself into the ground, with no time to tend to your family.”

In theory, because vegetables cannot be planted in continuous succession and the soil needs to recover after intensive cultivation, greenhouses should enjoy a fallow period of three to four months each year. But to maximise profits, agribusinesses and growers usually skip this break. If pests and diseases inside a greenhouse become too severe, they resort to staggered fallow rotations to keep the vegetable output flowing.

“Once you take on greenhouse farming, the work never stops; you have to labour every single day.” This fast-paced, highly intensive routine means producers are kept on a relentless treadmill by the crops throughout the year, drastically squeezing the time they have for social and community life.

● Public activities at the clan ancestral hall.

Gong County is a traditional settlement of the Hakka people. Owing to a long history of migration, Hakkas place paramount importance on family cohesion and participation in community affairs. Internal household events, such as house-building or weddings and funerals, are traditionally marked by banquets at the ancestral hall, gathering the clan to strengthen internal ties.

Greenhouse vegetable growers in this village, however, frequently miss out on these occasions: “Making money is for taking care of the family, right? Yet farming the greenhouse at home doesn’t even allow me to look after my family; it’s no different from leaving to work elsewhere. Working in the greenhouse means I can’t take part in anything else. People say that since I started greenhouse farming, they hardly recognise me anymore.”

In Gong County’s greenhouse vegetable industry, producers may appear to occupy a position of control, but in reality they are objects subjugated by market competition, no longer able to govern their own lives.

V. Greenhouse Vegetables as “Institutional Crops”

Returning to the initial question: faced with favourable market prospects and policy incentives, why are smallholder farmers reluctant to cultivate greenhouse vegetables?

The case of Gong County’s greenhouse vegetable industry demonstrates that, under capitalised management, greenhouse vegetables present a set of characteristics: rapid growth cycles, intensive water and fertiliser requirements, high technical thresholds, monoculture practices, vulnerability to pests and diseases, incompatibility with intercropping and crop rotation, and a pronounced overlap between production timelines and labour demands. These factors compel the sector to operate with a considerable degree of organisational structure, extending even to a institutional character.

Institutional Crops

In his analysis of religion in Chinese society, C. K. Yang distinguished between institutional religion and diffused religion. This article contends that these two modes carry typological and methodological weight, and can therefore be employed to examine the intrinsic alignment between crops, industries, and social life.

Within this context, the institutional character of a crop refers to the way in which the deep penetration of markets and capital imbues every stage of its lifecycle—from breeding, sowing, and cultivation to harvesting and subsequent commercial distribution—with distinct socio-institutional attributes, warranting the designation “institutional crop”. Once a farming operator engages with such institutional crops, their entire life must inevitably be organised around the biological and commercial rhythms of the crop or industry. As a result, production assumes the position of subject, while daily life is relegated to the object. This inversion stands as a primary driver behind operators’ desire to extricate themselves from these crops and the broader industry.

The greenhouse vegetable industry is, at its core, akin to industrialised production: standardised, homogenised, and organised within rigid institutional frameworks. The greenhouse itself functions as a miniature processing plant. Driven by the pursuit of maximum profit, capital erects sealed, enclosed spaces that wall off natural elements, attempting to break down crop cultivation into discrete processing stages and inject the necessary inputs to secure an economic return.

Put simply, producers must marshal labour and technology to command every stage of cultivation in the shortest time possible, compress growth cycles, and perfectly time their harvests to match market windows. Only then can they stand a chance of profiting in such cutthroat competition.

Once the logic of capital permeates the growing cycle, crops cease to be mere agricultural produce; they become capitalised instruments serving the expanded reproduction of capital. Consequently, the greenhouse vegetable industry, tethered to market mechanisms, operates like a treadmill. Once operators step on, they are compelled to keep pace. A lapse in investment or a slight falter in speed is enough to throw them off, leaving them sacrificed to the demands of competition.

● An underutilised greenhouse. Originally intended for high-value fruit and vegetable crops, it was temporarily repurposed for chives—which can easily be grown outdoors—following the operator’s misjudgement of the planting window.

VI. “Diffuse Crops”: White Lotus

While greenhouse vegetables, by their very nature, are highly susceptible to market and capital intervention—forcing growers to subordinate their entire lives to production schedules (institutional crops)—the traditional cultivation of white lotus in Gong County allows farmers to strike a balance between economic returns and social well-being (diffuse crops).

Diffuse crops

The ‘diffusive’ nature of a crop refers to its intrinsic growth characteristics, and the seamless integration this fosters between the traits of the resulting industry and the producers themselves. In industries centred on such diffusive crops, the plant’s growing cycle and natural rhythms may indeed bear the traces of human intervention and technological modification; yet they do not become disembedded from the social lives of the producers. Instead, they interweave naturally with the rhythm of daily life.

First, Gong County’s mountainous landscape and paddy fields are naturally suited to growing white lotus, avoiding the substantial upfront investment that greenhouse vegetables demand for land levelling and erecting structures. If cultivated on family-owned land, the cost is a mere 1,200 yuan per mu.

Second, field management and processing are straightforward. Growing, harvesting, and processing white lotus do not require the complex techniques needed for greenhouse vegetables, making it possible to draw heavily on household labour, including children, women and the elderly. As local farmers will tell you, “A single elder can look after five to six mu of white lotus.” During our household visits, we regularly observed families ranging from octogenarians to six-year-olds all taking part in processing the fresh lotus—shelling, peeling, and coring—effectively turning the home into a small-scale lotus workshop.

Moreover, white lotus has a long growing season of roughly 210 days. Because the seed heads, seeds and rhizomes do not all ripen simultaneously, growers can pace their work to suit their own daily rhythms. As locals say, “every part of the white lotus is useful.” The seeds (whether fresh or dried), leaves, flowers and rhizomes are all marketable, substantially increasing the crop’s economic return.

White lotus offers farmers both economic returns and the freedom to shape their own social and daily schedules. Drawing on the crop’s particular traits, farmers and their village communities have woven together intricate broker networks and market pricing systems, embedding white lotus firmly within their broader livelihood strategies.

Given these qualities, white lotus cannot, like greenhouse vegetables, assert dominance and evolve into a rigid, institutionalised production system. Consequently, it does not dictate farmers’ lives; rather, it becomes a natural part of them.

● Dried lotus leaves and processed seeds outside a villager’s home.

● A whole family getting to work shelling lotus seeds.

VII. What Kind of Industrial Revitalisation Does the Countryside Need?

This article does not argue that vegetable greenhouses are unsuited to rural society. Rather, it emphasises that if institutionalised agricultural industries such as greenhouse vegetables are to take root in the countryside, they must account for the farmers who are the primary agents of rural life, consider their broader lived realities, identify the most appropriate modes of integration, and leave adequate room for their production and daily livelihoods.

From an agricultural sociology perspective, we must not overlook the social dimensions of crops and industries, nor should we disregard their connections to households and the wider village community. Should we place a narrow emphasis on economic returns, assuming that any crop with strong profitability ought to be aggressively scaled up and transplanted as a commercial industry, we will inevitably face resistance or rejection from farmers and the rural social fabric.

In the farmers’ worldview, daily life and agricultural production form a single, integrated whole. For rural industrial revitalisation to succeed, it must draw upon the social relations within the village and the livelihood strategies of households. Only by adopting a holistic perspective that recognises agriculture, rural areas, and farmers as mutually reinforcing, and by identifying the social mechanisms that internally link and mobilise all three, can the overarching benefits of industrial revitalisation be fully realised.

References:

[1] Xiong Chunwen & Sang Kun. Crop Structure, Livelihood Systems, and the Effectiveness Mechanisms of Industry-Based Poverty Alleviation: An Empirical Study from a County in Eastern China [J]. Yunnan Social Sciences, 2020(03): 75-85.

[2] Sang Kun. Institutionalised Crops and Diffuse Crops: The Crop-Specific Mechanisms Behind Divergent Agricultural Industry Development: A Comparative Study of Two Agricultural Industries in a Central Chinese County [J]. Journal of Nanjing Agricultural University (Social Sciences Edition), 2023, 23(02): 45-60. DOI: 10.19714/j.cnki.1671-7465.2023.0024.

Foodthink Author

Sang Kun

He holds a Doctorate in Sociology from China Agricultural University. His research focuses on agricultural sociology, social theory, urban-rural development, and cultural anthropology. He has led Youth Projects funded by the National Social Science Fund of China, as well as General Program grants from the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation. He has published seven papers in CSSCI-indexed journals. Awarded the 2022 Beijing Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Prize, he is currently a Boya Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Researcher at the Department of Sociology, Peking University.

Editor: Zeen