Journey to the West for Farming Scripture: Notes from Ecological Farm-Hopping
I. Setting Off with Questions
Guixinyuan Farm practises ecological agriculture without pesticides, chemical fertilisers or herbicides. The farm’s owner, Qiang Ge, is an expert in Permaculture design, and the overall layout of the farm’s more than a hundred mu of woodland, ponds and fields is the most holistic I have ever seen. But Qiang Ge is rarely at the farm; two skilled workers handle the day-to-day growing. Gradually, I began to notice that I did not always agree with some of their practices.
It was a posture of “confronting the land and the plants”: swinging a hoe to turn the soil, using a rotary tiller to level the ground, spending hours every day pulling weeds. If grass roots have dug themselves deep underground, they must be wrenched out by force; if the soil lacks fertility and crops grow poorly, fertiliser is applied to push them along. But over time, the soil loses its vigour. Bare earth quickly turns hard and compacted, and a new round of secondary succession begins – the weeds return.
II. Guangzhou – Pengcheng Natural Farm (9 May)
The farm sits on a hillside. There is a house that doubles as a tea room, where Pengcheng and his family of three live, a small bread oven, an earthen building still under construction, and a little pavilion at the top. Forty-odd mu of hillside are given over mainly to fruit trees, with a mountain stream running through the property. Lychee trees in the low ground along the banks grow luxuriantly, creating a tropical landscape. Pengcheng could well be the most beautiful farm I have ever seen.
Pengcheng practises Natural Farming. At present he uses only a very small amount of worm castings, but his goal is clear: to achieve no-till and no-input farming, with no deliberate mulching. He says, “Fertiliser is medicine.” The farm has a natural vitality about it.
Sweet potatoes, lychees and guavas are the farm’s main sources of income. Pengcheng believes both lychees and guavas are well suited to this land. Out in the fields, he used the guava as an example to explain the difference between vegetative growth and reproductive growth, showing us how pruning can control when a tree puts on growth and when it flowers and fruits. If you are skilled enough, you can even shape a tree exactly as you wish simply by pinching off the tender shoots, without harming a single branch.
But Pengcheng also has his own views on all the various pruning techniques used on fruit trees.
He said that a fruit tree naturally possesses a “natural form” – the shape it would take without ever having been pruned. Farmers chasing yields will prune to dwarf the trees and encourage them to fruit sooner and more abundantly, but once a fruit tree has been pruned even once, its branches grow in a disorderly tangle, and constant pruning is needed to maintain balance. Unfortunately, nursery-grown saplings are already no longer in their natural form, and once they mature, pruning is unavoidable. He is also experimenting with a few fruit trees, trying to use pruning to coax them back to their natural form.
Besides fruit trees, he has tried growing maize, taro and other crops too. His approach there is far more nonchalant, though – simply cutting a strip through the grass at sowing time, planting seeds with a seed dibber, and trampling the surrounding grass down in place as mulch. One patch of chillies managed this way grew remarkably well, because the soil itself had been left to rest for five or six years and was richly fertile – quite a sight.
Throughout the day, whenever we asked about technical matters, Pengcheng would simply say, “There are no absolutes” – on the land, there are no absolute rules. Whether you need to prune, mow or fertilise all depends on the climate, the soil and the state of the crop. Of course, it also “depends on what you want” – the farmer’s other catchphrase. While some growers insist on high yields, Pengcheng yearns for a freer life, hoping that one day he can tend his orchard with less effort. That is why he practises Natural Farming, minimising human intervention and leaving the fruit trees in nature’s hands.
III. Guangzhou – Yinlin Ecological Farm (9–10 May)
The farm’s owner, Guo Rui, took us on a tour. The living area included a kitchen, guest rooms, a café, a warehouse and a dispatch area, while the growing area housed numerous polytunnels. From spatial layout to planting order, everything felt meticulously organised.
Growing vegetables in hot, humid Guangdong is incredibly difficult. The farm’s polytunnels come into their own: they keep pests out and allow precise water control. But there are trade-offs. Take courgettes: to combat the fruit flies rampant in Guangdong, our farm can only control them through fruit bagging. Yet bagging cannot be done before flowering if natural pollination is to take place – and by that stage, fruit flies have already laid their eggs inside. At Yinlin Farm, by contrast, courgettes grow inside polytunnels, free from pests, but there are too few pollinators, so hand-pollination is essential to secure yields.
The farm also sources traditional Chinese medicine residue and kitchen scraps from nearby for composting. Compost tea is collected and made into liquid fertiliser; this takes place in a dedicated area and requires secondary fermentation before the product can be applied. Unlike practitioners of Natural Farming, Guo Rui does not reject polytunnels, fertilising or other interventions outright; rather, he uses them within reasonable bounds, striving to strike a balance between protecting the ecosystem and achieving good yields.
The farm covers roughly seventy to eighty mu. Day-to-day field management is largely handled by aunties from the nearby village, who are accustomed to more traditional farming methods. Communication with them became a challenge in itself. For instance, Guo Rui insists on keeping the soil covered, advising that weeds need not be pulled up by the roots – simply cutting them and laying them down as mulch is enough – yet this was hard for the aunties to accept.
At the same time, the farm has attracted a group of young “new villagers”. Some simply use the farm’s space for their own ventures – for example, the “Chi Tu Workshop”, a small bakery – while others take part in the actual growing, forming experimental “growing groups”. This gathering of people and energy keeps the farm brimming with vitality.
IV. Guigang, Guangxi – Xingfu Baicaoyuan (12–14 May)
At Pengcheng and Yinlin farms, we paid for meals and accommodation at the standard rate for visiting farm friends, but Xingfu Baicaoyuan felt more like home: the farm owner, Sister Yanping, had laid out beds long before we arrived, and we had brought along plenty of Guixinyuan specialities – Litsea cubeba hydrosol, sand ginger and dried roselle, marigold and giant hyssop seeds, and old-variety sweet potatoes.
Xingfu Baicaoyuan is also tucked up in the hills – after the bus drops you, there is still a stretch of mountain path to walk. As far as the eye can see, the entire hilltop is planted with Wogan mandarins: one side so green it looks almost black, the other tinged yellow, the line between them unmistakable. Sister Yanping said the yellowish ones were our trees.
Here, the philosophy is pure “lazy farming” – no fertiliser, no pesticide, and the grass grows waist-high in the fields. Last year, citrus borers dealt a blow to the harvest, which came in at under 15 tonnes, well below previous years. The pest damage also killed quite a few citrus trees. Sister Yanping took it all in her stride and, together with Liu Heng (a second-cohort intern of Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme), added some new varieties of fruit trees.
The daily routine was patrolling the hillside. We followed Sister Yanping, picking wood ear from rotting tree roots while trampling down the grass around the fruit trees – using a sickle to bend the taller grass over and spread it around the base of each tree as mulch. Last of all, we would gather some Canna shoots, beggar’s ticks and Chinese knotweed to take back for dinner.
After dinner, we sat around the fire bowl, chatting, feet stretched out to soak up the warmth. Gangsong twigs and mugwort smouldered in the bowl, driving off the mosquitoes. Outside, fireflies appeared in growing numbers, so we moved to a little shelter on the hillside, sipping wine and watching fireflies light up every slope and hollow.
V. Guigang – Shande Mixed Farm (13 May)
Teacher Gan is a truly remarkable character. In Liu Heng’s words: “weirdly weird, adorably adorable”. He lives an extremely traditional life: photos of every successive national leader hang alongside portraits of the family’s virtuous forebears, together with ancestral virtues and family precepts. None of his six children attend school; they simply live at home, leading a “farming-and-reading” life. When we went out to the fields together, I was amazed that his youngest daughter could not only recognise the crops but already understood the principles of composting. Before each meal, the whole family stands in the centre of the main hall and recites a prayer, giving thanks for everything that made the meal possible – family and friends, and Mother Earth.
His farm is well known for its paddy rice. Besides selling rice, he also sells all manner of rice-based products – rice tea, rice cakes, rice noodles. At lunch, I reached for some rice noodles, but he stopped me, saying they needed to sit a little longer before they were ready to eat. When it came time to eat, you had to scoop them up with a spoon and chopsticks together and transfer them very gently into the bowl. This was, I think, the most moving meal I have ever eaten – not only because the fried rice, the rice noodles, and the stir-fried dried bean curd with soya beans were all extraordinarily delicious, but because of the principle: “You must always treat food with tenderness.”
Later we went to see his fields, but as for how exactly he manages weeds or makes compost, I can barely remember. It felt as though that was not even the important part; only his philosophy of life left a deep impression. The whole way back, I kept turning it over in my mind: Is it really possible that never going to school at all could be perfectly fine? Not seeking out more scientific knowledge, not seeing a bigger world – is that okay?
VI. Baise – Huashan Farm (15–16 May)
Now Teacher Luo works far away in Laos and only comes home every few months, while Wanxuan lives alone up on the hill, looking after a dozen-odd dogs and two hundred mu of land. That day, she paddled a bamboo raft across the river to pick us up. Standing on the raft, watching the river stretch out beneath us, it felt as though we had passed through yet another mystical barrier: I never imagined this journey would take us this far.
The lack of infrastructure at Huashan Farm pushes a modern person’s tolerance to the limit: the electricity lines cannot be strung across the river, so power comes solely from a small solar setup; building on farmland is not permitted, leaving only a bare wooden hut; and out in this wild, remote stretch, Wanxuan keeps a dozen-odd large dogs for safety, yet feeding them alone eats up half of each day’s work. And yet there we sat, in just such a hut, surrounded by the dogs, eating free-range chicken soup cooked over a wood fire, with sweet potato leaves and red mugwort greens simmered in the broth – simple yet delicious. In the evenings, we huddled around the precious light and chatted. Wanxuan is a great storyteller; she could laugh wholeheartedly while recounting how a storm had recently blown the roof clean off one night. We all call her “a heroine among women”.
But Wanxuan’s story was far rougher than anything we could have imagined. I later heard Teacher Luo say that when the land was first broken in 2019, they planted Cuimi kumquats, only to find the variety unsuitable. In 2021, they switched to growing oil-tea camellia, but as the weeds surged forward, the growers were pushed back – many seedlings were smothered beneath aggressive weeds. It was not until 2022, when they began tending the trees one by one with meticulous care, that survival rates finally started to climb. Yet those years were simply lost, and the camellia trees have still not fully matured. In the hardest times, to earn money, Wanxuan would go out and take on backbreaking girdling work on other people’s fruit trees to make ends meet.
We pitched our tents in the little wooden hut and spent the night through the rain. The next morning, the sky cleared and we went to patrol the hillside. Secondary succession was already in full swing – the grass grew thick and lush, and the oil-tea camellia saplings were very much the underdogs. Sister Yanping argued that simply trampling the grass down was all that was needed, but Wanxuan felt uneasy. Her parents-in-law often came up to the hill to help too, and they weeded very diligently, yet she herself had no farming experience and simply did not know what to do.
Teacher Luo had once hoped Sister Yanping could come and run Huashan Farm together, because whether it was building infrastructure or growing and managing the land, they desperately needed more hands. Wanxuan alone, with nothing but her bare hands, simply could not manage two hundred mu. Though reality remained bitter, Teacher Luo’s family was still optimistic – no matter what, as long as there are hills and land, a person can always find a way to go on. Besides, as far as they were concerned, the farm was only just getting started; the road ahead was long.
VII. Back to Guixinyuan
The moment we were back at Guixinyuan, the farm hosted a teacher visiting from Taiwan. While showing him around, I pointed to the bare patches of soil and asked what he thought of them. It was a casual question on my part, but he immediately sensed the meaning behind my words: “Of course, this isn’t ideal,” he said, “but it is the product of compromise.”
He said the two workers’ mindsets needed to shift gradually – that while the farming method chosen certainly mattered, so too did harmony between people. I felt a jolt, thinking back to the many adjustments I had navigated with Master Ajiang over the past month and a half. Beyond farming methods, I also needed to try to understand each other’s thinking through working together in the fields, and to accept the different ways people go about things.
Later we also had a chat with Master Ajiang. He understood the principles of soil restoration perfectly well, and knew the benefits of leaving the weeds and growing crops in diversity. But “after all, this land isn’t ours – the lease is only twenty years.” If you rely on time to slowly build up the soil, by the time it is in good shape, the lease will already have run out. And if you want to maximise yields, monoculture – weeding and fertilising by the routine – is the most efficient way to manage it.
Compared with before I set out, “agriculture” now held a far more holistic picture in my mind: from a small patch of field, I could see the varied ideas and aspirations of individual farmers, and beyond them the wider landscape of land tenure and agricultural systems. Ecological agriculture, though still a fringe part of that larger picture, might well be the most inclusive and socially significant part of it. At Guixinyuan Farm, I gained an introduction to agriculture – and friendships. Once you enter working life, places that welcome beginners with such openness and generosity are few and far between.
For the ten days on the road, the book Half-Farming, Half-X Life had been my constant companion. Watching ecological farmers scattered across Guangdong and Guangxi, each a small spark linked into a line, I felt ever more strongly that this way of life was viable: farming a small plot with Natural Farming methods to grow enough to feed yourself and your family, while taking on a part-time venture that enriches both your income and your life. By the time the journey ended, I could say: this must be where my ideal lies.
I had arrived at the farm just in time for the peanut sowing, then spent several days straight up on the hill cutting Dicranopteris ferns for mulch, after which we left the plot to its own devices. One day, walking over to the peanut field, I suddenly saw that it had turned a lush, vivid green – such a magical moment: I felt the power of the earth all at once. Weeds grew alongside the peanuts too – first sprouting between the ridges, then, after the rains, spreading up onto the ridges themselves. For a while now I had been busy managing them.
In the process I made many discoveries: the weeds along the ridge edges helped hold the soil together so it would not all wash away in the rain; ladybirds loved eating the berries of black nightshade, and shield bugs preferred another weed heavy with seed, so I left a patch for them, well out of the way. For the weeds between the ridges I only mowed, never pulled; but where the grass grew close to the peanut roots on the ridge tops I pulled it out – which also loosened the soil, letting the flower pegs push through into the ground. The cut grass I carried basket by basket to the fish pond nearby – three or four baskets in a half-day.
To date, three cohorts of recruitment have been completed, supporting more than sixty partners in joining over ten ecological farms across the country for internships ranging from three months to a year.
Editor: Wang Hao