At an Ecological Farm, How Many Skills Must a Post-2000s Farming Novice Learn?
I. From Textbook to Field
So, to a certain extent, it was instinct that led me to make this decision. But I felt I had at least a modest foundation—after all, during my landscape architecture degree, the university had offered botany courses, and I had studied plant-related subjects. Still, when I actually walked out into the fields, what I experienced was a completely different way of relating to nature and plants.
The farm covers just over eighty mu in total, with more than twenty mu given over to cultivation. The main workforce here is two skilled farm hands and two women workers. When I first arrived in March, the roadsides were still entirely bare; only the fields and polytunnels held any green.
What struck me as a little “shocking” was this: on the afternoon of my first day, Yuan Qinghua, the farm’s proprietor, gave me a tour. As we walked past the vegetable beds, Teacher Yuan plucked pea shoots, Hangzhou bok choy, and kale and popped them straight into his mouth. At home, I would rinse market vegetables several times and still feel they weren’t clean enough; yet here, produce made its way so naturally, so seamlessly, from soil to mouth.
Later, while weeding the fields and the roadside verge alongside the farm workers, I was delighted to find that certain weed names I had forgotten since leaving university gradually came back to me, one swing of the hoe at a time.
One thing that stuck with me: by early June, spiranthes began to sprout in the lawn. Before that, I had only ever seen them in books and photographs. Seeing one so close for the first time, I realised what a remarkably ordered little flower it is—petals layering one upon another in a slow upward spiral, beautiful and distinctive from every angle. Yet their fate in a lawn could only be to vanish beneath the mower. Feeling reluctant to let them go, I dug up a dozen and potted them, placing them at the entrance to the Five Senses Healing Garden in the farm’s west section. Happily, most of them thrived, extending their flowering period by a good while in their new home.
II. Labour Is Creation
On my first day at the farm, I joined Teacher Yuan and a young child, another member of the farm community, in the entire process of building a wooden frame—from deciding on the design to cutting the boards, assembling them, and hammering in the nails. The farm’s mower seemed to break, get fixed, and break again in a never-ending cycle. During the busy weeding season, the little tool shed had already transformed into an equipment repair station, and every day I could see Teacher Yuan hunched inside, head down, absorbed in his endless “mending.”
One day in April, a freak gust of wind tore off most of the roof of the farm’s large timber building. Working together as a team, we completed the roof repair without any “professionals” involved. It was my first time ever climbing onto a roof and hammering nails up there. At first I couldn’t even bring myself to climb the ladder, but once I got the hang of it, I was able to go up and down with reasonable composure—though my thighs still trembled with fear.
Thinking back on my three months at the farm, alongside all these big and small “repair jobs,” I also took on many other kinds of tasks. In terms of decorating the farm, I helped update and paint the farm’s signs and painted tyres. I also tried many things I had long wanted to do but never had the chance: raising seedlings of Chinese medicinal herbs together with everyone, helping transplant the corn and bean seedlings; trying my hand at making mugwort and mint balm and mosquito repellent; watching hydroponic seeds sprout one after another; brewing kombucha; wrapping baozi, baking croissants.
Through the process of working, my awareness of the physical environment around me grew sharper too. What left the strongest impression was a hot composting system on the west side of the farm, with coiled pipes buried inside it—the heat generated by the compost warms the water, so that when you turn on the connected tap, hot water flows out. I thought the concept and the design were incredibly ingenious, and I later learned that because the farm follows permaculture and natural farming principles, the design prioritises the self-circulating flow of the farm’s material elements.
III. Days Among the Animals
Later I started paying attention to which wild grasses they favoured. Sometimes, while weeding nearby, I’d spot a particular kind and make a special trip just to feed the goats before heading back to finish the job. Even later I began observing the kids nursing—they wag their tails with such joyful vigour when they get the milk, not so different from a happy puppy.
The farm does have a few dogs, and the longer you spend with them, the more you notice each has its own personality. But one thing they all share: every morning, looking out through the glass door, you’ll find them lying just a short distance from the entrance, then the moment you push it open they snap their heads up and come bounding towards you, tails wagging.
By the time my internship was halfway through, the wild grass in the original fenced paddock was running low, and with the season turning, weeds were growing madly everywhere else on the farm. Eventually, we had to lead the goats out to graze. When I first took on this task, I’d get up eagerly every morning to fetch the goats, and then begin a tug-of-war with some rather stubborn does.
These animals are astonishingly alive, brimming with vitality; sometimes the obstacles we humans put in their way simply don’t faze them at all. The bucks would snap the rope again and again, leaping into the does’ paddock; the kids always found a way to squeeze through the fence and nibble the chilli seedlings in someone else’s vegetable plot. The new ducks kept vaulting over the fencing we thought would contain them, then reappearing in the roadside ditch when everyone was certain they’d gone missing. Even the raccoon dogs that wandered by always managed to bypass the traps and burrow into the henhouse for a feast.
IV. The Courage to Explore the Future
But the vegetables themselves are wonderful, and being able to share them with more people is a joy in itself. So, alongside the farm’s daily work, I really enjoyed running a market stall—the feeling of chatting with strangers, the happiness of seeing something I love acknowledged by others. You have to understand: for many years before this, even saying a word to a stranger filled me with dread.
Working on the farm and at the market seemed to create an environment in which I could open up. Even I was surprised by the shift. In this sense, the farm truly offered me many possibilities—here I could boldly say no to things I didn’t want to do or couldn’t do, and test which things I might try and succeed at. Before coming to the farm I had been groping uncertainly for my next path in life. I can’t yet say I’ve found a concrete direction, but these three months have at least given me more courage to keep exploring what lies ahead.
Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme
To date, four rounds of recruitment have been completed, supporting over sixty participants in placements at more than ten ecological farms across the country, ranging from three months to a year.
Edited by: Zheng Yuyang