Cultivating a vanishing glutinous rice in the hills of Sichuan

◉ At 11 am on 18 July, Sun Wenxiang, the subject of this article, will be joined by two other guests at the Chengdu Life Market to discuss heirloom varieties and ecological agriculture. Readers from outside the city can book to watch the livestream.

Farmer Sun Wenxiang stood in his concrete courtyard to welcome us, his large, calloused feet bare.

In early July, Hongya County in Meishan City, Sichuan Province, had just experienced several torrential rainstorms. It was a rare few days of downtime between farm tasks. In another fortnight, the maize in Sun Wenxiang’s fields would be ready for harvest.

Since 2013, Sun Wenxiang, along with his wife and father, has transformed 16 mu of family land in Qilong Village, Dongyue Town, Hongya County, into an ecological farm. He has preserved over 12 varieties of heirloom rice seeds, including the local variety “Red-beak Glutinous Rice” — an endangered ingredient listed in the International Slow Food movement’s “Ark of Taste”. Sun Wenxiang is also featured in the book Disappearing Foods as a protector of rice varieties.

I. Vanishing Rice

Qilong Village is situated in a hilly region; as the car winds up the mountains, the view from the window is dominated by dense thickets of bitter bamboo and ruler bamboo. On fragmented plots of land, villagers grow golden tea, maize, and rice. However, most farmers from the surrounding villages have left to find work in the cities; “a month’s wages from working can buy far more rice than we could ever grow,” they say. Many of their lands have also been leased out through local government schemes for large-scale “hundred-mu fertile field” farming.

At the end of 2023, a work on agricultural biodiversity titled *Disappearing Foods* was translated and published in China. Written by Dan Saladino, a food journalist for the BBC, the book documents 34 crops across the globe that are on the brink of extinction but are being protected by farmers. In the chapter on rice, the farmer he interviewed was Sun Wenxiang.

This chapter provides a detailed account of the history of global cultivated rice and the loss of wild rice diversity since the 1960s. For example, the International Rice Research Institute developed “IR8”, a high-yielding, pest-resistant variety that spread rapidly across Asia, prompting farmers to abandon local varieties. The book notes that in the 1950s, Hunan Province had over 1,300 rice varieties, a figure that had plummeted to 84 by 2014.

The grains of the Red-beak Glutinous Rice grown by Sun Wenxiang feature a red spot, hence the name “red-beak”. According to *Disappearing Foods*, wild rice is naturally red, and red rice is more nutrient-dense than white rice. However, because whiter rice is easier to rinse and cook, farmers gradually altered its colour through cultivation. The flavour of Red-beak Glutinous Rice is “unforgettable”, with a texture that is both soft and sticky — a characteristic resulting from a genetic mutation.

◉ BBC journalist Dan Saladino interviewing Sun Wenxiang at his farm in Hongya, Sichuan, and recording the story of him and the Red-beak Glutinous Rice in *Disappearing Foods*. Image source: Sun Wenxiang

Unlike the short, coarse, and stiff stalks of hybrid rice, the Red-beak variety grows up to 1.5 metres tall. This makes it more prone to lodging, meaning the grower must drain the fields in May, after the rice has headed, to ensure the root systems are stable. However, in 2020, a powerful typhoon swept through, flattening all of Sun Wenxiang’s glutinous rice overnight. The grains became waterlogged and sprouted, affecting the taste and making them unsellable. “Farming means living at the mercy of nature,” Sun Wenxiang says. He did not regret his choice; instead, he continued to select and save seeds, ready to plant again the following year.

In addition to Red-beak Glutinous Rice, Sun Wenxiang grows varieties such as rough rice, Simiao, red rice, Bama Ancient Fragrant Rice, and Guiyou No. 6, 7, and 8. He also cultivates heirloom varieties of waxy maize, yellow maize, Job’s tears, potatoes, pumpkins, and black beans, with seeds sourced from fellow farmers and professors of agronomy across the country. He gave us a special introduction to an old plum tree — a local variety that had been there since his childhood. The fruit it bears is a bright yellow, about the size of a pigeon’s egg, with a rich, sweet-and-sour flavour.

◉ In early July, the Red-beak Glutinous Rice in Sun Wenxiang’s fields had already headed.

II. Turning to Ecological Agriculture

Before returning home to farm, Sun Wenxiang had been a “minor official”. During the People’s Commune era, he served as a scorekeeper for the production brigade, then became an accountant, and spent ten years as a village brigade captain. Later, he ventured into construction work before being introduced to a mining company, where he rose from safety officer to mine manager.

In 2013, a chance encounter introduced him to a grassroots organisation called the Chengdu River Research Society. The society was founded in 1997 in response to the renovation of the Funan River in Chengdu. Agricultural pollution—including pesticides, chemical fertilisers, and livestock waste—was identified as a primary cause of the degradation of river ecosystems. Since rivers flow through both the countryside and the city, protecting them requires the participation of both. Consequently, the society supports upstream farmers in adopting ecological agriculture to reduce pollution, while simultaneously organising collective buying and farmers’ markets in the city to help those farmers sell their produce. (For more, see Foodthink: No Clean Rivers, No Safe Food).

One of Sun Wenxiang’s relatives happened to be a volunteer with the society and invited him to Chengdu for training. “He asked me, ‘Son-in-law, do you want to go home and do “ecological agriculture”?’ At the time, I didn’t understand either of those terms; I just wanted an excuse to go out and have some fun.” Driven by his love for travel and making friends, Sun hitched a ride on a bus from the neighbouring town in 2012 and made it to Chengdu without spending a penny.

This training provided Sun Wenxiang with a crucial piece of information: farming could be as lucrative as working a job. In Anlong Village, Pi County, on the outskirts of Chengdu, a fellow farmer named Wang Cheng earned 60,000 yuan a year for a couple farming just four mu of land. At the time, as a mine manager, Sun had to bear the responsibility for safety risks; even with double bonuses, his earnings were roughly the same. On the eighth day of the first lunar month, he called the mine and resigned.

Sun’s wife, Xian Zhihui, had never left the land, and Sun had always returned home to help during the busy farming seasons, so transitioning to full-time farming was not a difficult leap for them.

Approaching it with an entrepreneurial spirit, they hired workers to reclaim wasteland in the village. “The grass was this deep,” he said, gesturing to his waist. At the peak, the total area they rented or farmed on behalf of others reached nearly 30 mu.

◉ Attending external training helped Sun Wenxiang attract wider attention; it was through the Slow Food movement that the author of *Foods in Disappearance* discovered him and came to interview him.

III. Restoring Heirloom Varieties

Xian Zhihui married into Dongyue Town from another nearby commune. In both her and Sun Wenxiang’s memories, the surrounding villages used to be covered in Red-billed Glutinous Rice. Sun recalls that when he was a child, every household made their own puffed rice candy, which required a raw material called “yinmi” (shadow rice), made by soaking and steaming glutinous rice before air-drying it for half a month). However, by 2014, when Sun Wenxiang wanted to plant Red-billed Glutinous Rice again, he could no longer find any seeds.

Fortunately, Xian Zhihui’s mother pointed them in the right direction: one family on the nearby Ba Mian Mountain was still growing it. Only then was Sun able to obtain seeds. Later, under the “Grain-for-Green” reforestation policy in Hongya County, rice cultivation on the mountains ceased entirely.

He also uses traditional methods to make “fire rice” (huomi). The rice is poured into an iron pot filled with water and brought to a boil over a large fire in a clay stove. The rice is stirred constantly, “popped” by the high-temperature steam, and after being left overnight with the fire off, it is dry-fired again to ensure the grains are fully burst open. Once dried in the sun, the husks are removed. This rice carries a stronger aroma of the husk and expands more when steamed—a taste memory from the 1960s and 70s, before Sun was ten years old.

◉ Fire rice produced by Sun Wenxiang using traditional methods. Photo: Sun Wenxiang

Sun Wenxiang’s understanding of ecological agriculture extends beyond the “Six-No’s” (no pesticides, chemical fertilisers, herbicides, hormones, plastic mulch, or GMO seeds); he is equally concerned with taste and health. He maintains over ten different varieties of rice seeds from across the country, preserving such a diverse range in order to find a sweeter, more fragrant flavour. He often thinks of a variety called “Zhejiang Grain” that was grown during the village’s collective production era; many elders in the village still long for the aroma of that rice, recalling that “you didn’t need any side dishes; you could eat two or three bowls of just the rice.” But that variety has now vanished without a trace.

Seeds for Bama Ancient Precious Fragrant Rice were sent to him by a client in Beijing. As an imported variety, he is unfamiliar with its origin or the specific climate and temperature it prefers, but he has successfully sown and harvested it; it now sells for 30 yuan per jin.

Another variety introduced this year came from Professor Ma Jun of the Rice Research Institute at Sichuan Agricultural University. Other members of the village cooperative led by Sun have already begun planting it.

He also specifically grows a type of upland rice, the seeds of which were brought from Beijing by a client in Renshou, Meishan. It can be interplanted with other rice and produces yields of 800 to 1,000 jin per mu.

Many fellow farmers have also expressed interest in the Red-billed Glutinous Rice seeds, and he distributed over 100 jin this year. Sun proudly told us that Yuan Longping’s team also used this variety to breed new hybrid rice.

Yet, to this day, he has not encountered an heirloom seed that can match the taste of the Zhejiang Grain, which continues to drive him to plant more varieties.

◉ Porridge cooked with Red-billed Glutinous Rice. Photo: Zhang Xiaomao

IV. The Vanishing Circular Ecosystem

Using heirloom varieties and ecological farming and husbandry methods has also made him feel healthier.

Sun Wenxiang noticed that his ‘black soil’ pigs rarely fall ill; he attributes this both to the natural resilience of the heirloom breed and their natural diet. He has no need for a vet to administer vaccines, and he can even handle the farrowing himself. Every day or two, he and his wife weed the fields, selecting a specific type of ‘pig-weed’ as a primary feed for the pigs, which is then mixed with rice bran and cornmeal. By raising pigs, the rice bran and surplus corn are utilised within the farm’s own cycle.

Pig farming has thus become an indispensable link in Sun Wenxiang’s ecological farm. Under the ‘six no-use’ ecological planting model—avoiding pesticides, chemical fertilisers, herbicides, hormones, agricultural films, and GMO seeds—farmers must produce their own biogas slurry, enzymes, and oil cake to enrich the soil. The manure from his nine black pigs is perfectly suited for fermentation into liquid fertiliser. In a large-scale industrial pig farm, manure and the wastewater used to flush it would instead be routed through treatment ponds and handled as waste, often becoming a source of pollution.

◉ Sun Wenxiang showing the enzyme barrels in the composting shed.

Without livestock, the farm’s composting process would be insufficient, and the ‘cycle’ would break.

The cycle of soil fertility also requires balance. To maximise soil nutrients and create greater economic value, he intercrops soybeans and sweet potatoes beneath his rice and maize; alternatively, he sows rapeseed during the spring equinox, transplanting rice seedlings in May. Unlike industrial farming, where land is continuously used for medicinal herbs or cash crops after the autumn harvest, Sun leaves his fields in winter, piling them with cleared weeds, maize stalks, and rice straw to restore fertility and allow the land to recover.

But just as the heirloom seeds are vanishing, the pig breeds are facing a similar risk of extinction.

Sun keeps his own heirloom sows, but during the mating season each year, he must find a boar to avoid inbreeding. There was once such a boar in the village, but it unfortunately died during the African Swine Fever outbreak. Since then, villagers have had to rely on hybrid semen and artificial insemination.

There is still one hybrid boar in the town, but Sun recently discovered that the owner no longer wishes to keep it. Fewer and fewer smallholders are raising pigs nowadays, preferring to buy meat from the market. The annual cost of keeping a boar is significant; without enough sows to mate, maintaining one is simply not cost-effective.

◉ Sun Wenxiang and his wife, Xian Zhihui, are regular participants at the Chengdu Life Market. Here, they have met many consumers eager to buy ecological produce and heirloom varieties, providing an income sufficient for them to commit to farming full-time. Photo: Zhang Xiaomao

V. No Farming Without Hard Work

Because no herbicides are used, ecological farming is grueling. As Sun Wenxiang welcomed us into the courtyard to begin our meeting, Xian Zhihui had already returned to the fields to weed. His elderly father could not keep still either, spending his time cutting bamboo on the mountain.

Sun Wenxiang noted that farm work is endless; there are days when they toil from dawn until dusk.

In some regions, ecological farming encourages a symbiosis between crops and weeds. However, in the humid heat of the Sichuan hills, weeds can grow so rapidly that they blot out the sun and stifle the crops within days. Consequently, weeding must be done every single day.

Sun Wenxiang also relies entirely on manual labour for fertilisation. They create their own fertiliser from a mixture of biogas slurry, oil cake, and enzymes, which is then carried into the fields in baskets balanced on a shoulder pole. Each basket weighs between 40 and 50 kilograms, and the process continues until every plot is fertilised. This is back-breaking work that no machine can replace.

Ecological cultivation also entails longer growing cycles. For instance, since they do not use greenhouses or plastic mulch to keep the soil warm, the old pumpkins take ten months to harvest, and the chillies take an extra fortnight to ripen.

Across their ten odd mu of farmland, the three of them do not have strictly defined roles. During the peak season, Sun Wenxiang, his wife, and his father work together to transplant seedlings and plant maize. After the harvest, Sun Wenxiang handles the shipping and hosts customers and visitors, granting him a small amount of respite. Xian Zhihui, however, bears the brunt of the labour. “She is always out there working, and she has to cut fodder for the pigs. Look at her hands and feet; they are covered in hard calluses and fissures, which then get infected by the dew from the grass.” This is the reality for anyone truly immersed in farm work.

VI. Who Will Protect the Heirloom Varieties?

*The Disappearing Foods* is not the first work to discuss the importance of heirloom varieties in terms of ecology, culture, and food security. Yet the act of growing these varieties—work that seemingly serves all of humanity—is, for the farmers, more of a spontaneous grassroots effort. Sun Wenxiang receives no policy subsidies for this, even though his ecological methods have been recognised by various levels of government.

One year, he was invited by the Hongya County government to attend agricultural broker training as an exception, even receiving a scholarship of over 10,000 yuan for travel and tuition. At the time, Sichuan Province was developing the “Tianfu Granary” project. In a class of 50, he was the oldest, and the only one practising ecological farming; everyone else was engaged in large-scale farming using pesticides and chemical fertilisers.

Sun Wenxiang once hoped to encourage more people to adopt ecological methods.

In the twelfth lunar month of 2013, he convened a meeting with seven or eight villagers to promote the philosophy of ecological agriculture. However, the general consensus was that without chemical fertilisers and herbicides, yields were too low and weeding was simply too arduous.

In recent years, an increasing number of villagers in their fifties and sixties have begun returning to their hometowns. He pointed to a row of small terraced slopes behind his vegetable garden. A few of these plots, which Sun Wenxiang had once cleared and cultivated, were reclaimed by returning villagers. Unfortunately, they reverted to conventional farming: spreading chemical fertilisers, spraying pesticides, and using hybrid seeds. Even when growing staples for their own table, they prefer convenience: “My wife is still out there weeding, but they don’t do that; they can just sit at the table playing cards and eating.”

◉ The red-mouth glutinous rice grown by Sun Wenxiang’s family (bottom right); in the distance are the seedling nurseries and rice fields reclaimed by other villagers for large-scale farming.

It is not that ecological produce lacks a market or value for money; Sun Wenxiang has calculated that one mu of land can earn an average of over 10,000 yuan a year, and demand exceeds supply. But ecological farming is simply too exhausting, and the standards are too difficult to maintain. “It doesn’t matter if the land is smaller; we’re getting old and can’t plant as much anyway.” He is 61 this year; his father is 87.

Sun Wenxiang’s daughter lives in the Wenjiang District of Chengdu. Having studied animal husbandry in Ya’an, she is willing to return and inherit her parents’ ecological farm, but only after her own daughter finishes secondary school. Her husband, however, is not well-versed in farm work. Will the two of them become the new stewards of the farm? Sun Wenxiang does not know.

◉ Through the Chengdu Life Market and his own social circle, Sun Wenxiang is able to sell ecological produce at higher prices. Photo: Sun Wenxiang, Zhang Xiaomao

VII. Beyond Flavour, What Else Will We Lose?

Climate change has already begun to affect Sun Wenxiang’s crops. This spring, a widespread drought hit central and southern China, and temperatures soared across Sichuan, reaching 38 degrees even in the mountains. The maize leaves dried up completely, losing all their green. He paid to divert river water from mountain gullies to irrigate the land, requiring pumping almost every day; when one pump burned out, he simply bought another.

The rains that usually arrive in May were delayed by over a month. When they finally came in late June and early July, they arrived as torrential downpours, flattening the maize.

Sun Wenxiang purchased the pumps and electricity himself; he says electricity prices in the village are the same as in the city. Although the government is funding rural infrastructure—at the highest point of his land, there is an insect-repelling lamp gifted by the government, said to cost 3,000 yuan—Sun Wenxiang is wary. The government is also installing streetlights in the village, but having grown accustomed to the pitch-black rural nights, he worries that new light sources will attract insects and disrupt natural cycles, thereby affecting the crops.

From 2024, under government mobilisation, many villagers’ plots were leased to private outside landlords at a rate of 550 yuan per mu per year. These lands are managed centrally to develop “high-standard farmland”. The villagers, once farmers, have become casual labourers, earning 10–20 yuan per hour, waiting at home for work to appear. This year, the first seedlings were not planted until long after the Spring Equinox.

However, policies are shifting. Sun Wenxiang has noticed that small-scale family operations, such as husband-and-wife grain farming, may be the new direction encouraged by the government. On 2 July, he received a notice from the County Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs asking him to submit a report; the province is looking for typical examples of family-run grain farming where total income is comparable to that of migrant workers. A daily newspaper also wants to interview him. Previously, only large-scale growers with thousands of mu of grain would receive such attention.

Sun Wenxiang says that with the economy struggling over the last two years, even those who go away for work often return and leave again throughout the year. He feels more people will return home next year.

High-standard farmland or small-scale peasant farming? Simple tending, abandonment, or the nurturing of more family ecological farms? In Qilong Village, Sun Wenxiang’s small plots—growing heirloom rice and potatoes, entwined with weeds and wildflowers—seem somewhat lonely. The subtitle of the book *The Disappearing Foods* poses the same question on a grander scale: Beyond the loss of flavour, what else will we lose?

Foodthink Author

Pei Dan

A writer returned to her true calling, focusing on climate change, the ecological environment, and the individuals living through these transformations.

– Event Announcement –

This morning, Sun Wenxiang will appear at the Chengdu Life Market as one of the guest speakers for the *The Disappearing Foods* book club, curated by Foodthink, to share his stories of ecological farming and the preservation of heirloom varieties.

At the market, you can not only buy his produce but also meet other ecological smallholders from Sichuan and taste a rich variety of traditional local ingredients. Chengdu readers are welcome to visit the market and join the book club today. Readers from elsewhere can book a live stream of the event via the Chengdu Life Market or watch the replay.

Images: All taken by the author unless otherwise stated

Editor: Tianle

Poster: Z X