When 996 Wage Workers Meet the Work Ethic of an Ecological Farm
I. The Work Ethic of Baicao Garden
Yirun Planting Farm in Gangbei District, Guigang, Guangxi—where Baicao Garden sits—was originally a plot that Sister Yan Ping, her husband, and the households of her niece and nephew had shared as three families back in 2017. The three families farmed together at first, but the partnership eventually dissolved. For the niece and nephew, without herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilisers, it was hard to hit annual yield targets. For Sister Yan Ping, however, the damage wrought upon the working and living environment was simply unbearable. Moreover, behind the use of herbicides and agrochemicals lay a work ethic rooted in the alienation of body and mind.
Today, Baicao Garden stands as a world apart, sharply delineated from the plots of her niece and nephew. Baicao Garden is fragrant with blossom and fruit, wild with weeds, and alive with fireflies at night; the neighbouring plots, however, lie barren and withered.
Sister Yan Ping’s fifty mu are mostly planted with Wogan mandarins, yielding on average around thirty thousand jin a year. She feels no grief over fallen fruit or failed trees; though they drop to the ground, they enrich the soil. And the weeds and insects that seem to hinder the fruit trees carry their own value—nourishing the land and sustaining biodiversity. This attitude towards soil and crop is mirrored in the way Sister Yan Ping works.
“I’m never in a rush when I work. When I’m tired, I just lie down on the grass and rest—I work and play at the same time.” For Sister Yan Ping and all the friends who come to learn at Baicao Garden, our work treats body and mind as the “subject”; work is not the kind of thing that seizes control and crushes us—it nourishes and fulfils our body and mind. Liu Heng, Baicao Garden’s partner, observes and records the daily changes in every plant on the land, and that very practice feeds his curiosity and his care. Our fellow intern San Mu often finds himself lost in a state of “flow” while mowing; by midday, I have to go to the balcony to call him in, and Linda too, still meditating on the grass, for lunch.
Sister Yan Ping treats weeding and other simple farm chores as a form of practice—a way to strengthen body and mind. She truly delights in such labour, and hopes everyone might live a life this simple. For her, cultivation means “repeating simple things, over and over.” Yet we work only half a day, and the other half is free: some practise martial arts, some meditate, some drink tea, some read poetry aloud… Later, Sister Yan Ping bought calligraphy supplies, and we began practising our brushstrokes too.
Among our fellow learners at Baicao Garden, there are those who once earned high salaries at consultancies and those who held comfortable, undemanding posts in good technical positions. The former left people exhausted in body and mind, spirits spent; the latter left them adrift in a long, slow emptiness. These roles make one feel like a replaceable cog, devoid of agency, at anyone’s disposal. The paradox of this work ethic is this: if you wish to join the social division of labour and become a useful person, you must accept becoming a cog.
For us wage workers—including the agrochemical farmers of Wule Town—this paradox is plain to see. I believe the chemical-farming neighbours of Wule Town do not relish the smell of herbicides either, and they too grow weary and weary of work that alienates their body and mind. But they have no understanding of ecological agriculture, and even less say in the market; naturally they can only play by its rules, drifting into the inertia of habit.
Mencius said, “The people’s turning towards benevolence is like water flowing downhill.” In other words, “benevolence” is our true nature, as natural as water seeking lower ground. What we call “un-benevolence” is nothing more than numbness—hence the phrase “numbed to benevolence.” A society now governed by capital, technology and consumption encourages us to grow numb, and those who refuse to be numbed become obstacles to capital, technology and consumerism in their relentless expansion.
II. Heirloom Seeds, New Hopes
Uncle Youming’s White Pants Yao village is, in itself, a place where gods and humans dwell together; for them, divine signs are real, certain, and beyond question. The village once possessed a fully coherent cultural system encompassing medicine, education, food, farming, festivals, dress, family values and governance. Living within it, the White Pants Yao shaped their own character, enduring alongside all things in heaven and on earth, forming a community bound by feeling towards the world and loyalty among its people.
Like Sister Yan Ping, Uncle Youming had left his village years ago to find wage work in the city. He, too, found no sense of belonging—only loneliness. Even doing back-breaking labour, he could see no good future ahead. After eight years of such toil, he returned home in 2008, only to find the village greatly changed. Overuse of herbicides had left the paddies bare of even a single blade of grass; the soil had suffered severe compaction.
Not only that: the village’s traditional ethnic culture was being dismantled, too. In Uncle Youming’s youth, the village planted just one crop of grain a year. Apart from the busy farming season, work lasted only two or three months. What did they do with the rest of the year? Entertainment—hunting together, playing, celebrating folk festivals. “Then why not keep living this way?” I asked. “Because everyone wants to make money now,” Uncle Youming sighed.
“In the old days, everyone was happy to help one another and we were close. Now, the moment someone asks for a favour, the first thing out of their mouth is how much they’ll be paid. Most of the young people have gone to the city for work, casting off their ethnic identity; the words of their elders carry no weight with them anymore.” Uncle Youming often felt a deep sense of loss watching the village’s spirit of mutual care and fellowship slowly fade.
Must earning a living in the modern world necessarily mean estrangement from—or even the destruction of—the land and way of life passed down through generations? Carrying this worry, Uncle Youming resolved to walk the path of ecological self-rescue.
With the help of a charity, Uncle Youming first tried planting with hybrid seeds, planning to reduce pesticides and chemical fertilisers year by year until they were eliminated entirely. But the harvests were dismal. The following year, the charity invited an expert from Yunnan who brought his own heirloom seeds—but that didn’t work either. Uncle Youming realised that choosing heirloom seeds takes discernment; each variety must suit the land it is sown in. He applied to source heirloom seeds locally in Guangxi and at last succeeded.
From then on, Uncle Youming was certain: if ecological agriculture were to develop, he must safeguard these heirloom seeds—those that had grown naturally alongside the local ecology and could be saved from season to season. The hybrid seeds or GM seeds we see most commonly today simply cannot be saved for replanting. “If farmers rely only on seeds sold on the market, it is as though they have been stripped of their right to control a part of their means of production.” With that recognition, Uncle Youming’s conviction to protect heirloom seeds grew even stronger.
Whenever he had the chance, he searched for heirloom seeds—whether in his own village, elsewhere in China or even abroad—and collected them as widely as possible, to the point of establishing his own living ecological seed bank. He preserves rice seeds in batches and by stages across dryland plots, balconies, experimental fields and open paddies. His pages of meticulous study notes and sowing records make one marvel: here truly is a practitioner of ecological agriculture.
The old ways of farming and the old culture were cast aside in just this way. Swept into the new world, people discovered they were never the masters of it at all—only bewildered passers-by with no roots and no way to put down roots. Looking back, they found the homeland of the old world already destroyed by their own hands. It was the very fate of heirloom seeds: once people grew used to buying new seeds from the market, the old varieties, long neglected in selection and breeding, grew frail and prone to disease, entirely without competitive edge against the new seeds on offer.
III. A Boundless World, Full of Promise
In truth, this longing for a new work ethic and a humanistic tradition one can put down roots in is shared by countless young people among us. Even those who do not yet know they carry it within them—just look at the complaints and criticisms of unreasonable working and living conditions posted on Xiaohongshu—and you can see the urge to change things stirring deep in their hearts.
These days, many who speak of rural revitalisation bring up ecological agriculture. But if we discuss rural revitalisation solely in terms of ecological farming methods, the vitality of that “revitalisation” still falls short. Yet if, like Sister Yan Ping, we see in Baicao Garden a hope for a new work ethic, or, like Uncle Youming, view ecological agriculture as a safeguard for the cultural self-determination of one’s own people—that is, if we understand the relationship between ecological agriculture and rural revitalisation through the people’s hopes, through their longing for a new way of living and a new state of being—then I believe we can truly affirm the old saying: a boundless world, full of promise.
To date, three cohorts have been completed, supporting over sixty partners in taking up farm internships—lasting from three months to a year—at more than a dozen ecological farms across the country.
Edited by: Zheng Yuyang