Learning from the Rainforest: Being a Happy Small Ecological Farmer in Xishuangbanna

The Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve lies on the only road north to Dadu’gang. In the spring of 2020, sixteen Asian elephants set off from this very spot, trekking all the way to Kunming before turning back into the rainforest. The herd’s famous exodus was attributed to decades of expanding human activity, and the rubber plantations and tea gardens glimpsed through the car window are a small reflection of how much habitat the wild elephants have lost.

Felling a forest is easy; regrowing one is not. What has been reshaped is not just the landscape and the ecology, but the relationship between people and the land. Agricultural land carved out of the rainforest years ago—restoring it at scale is no simple matter. Beyond monoculture rubber and tea, is there a way to put this land to more sustainable use?

Amid the rolling landscape of tea gardens and rubber plantations, the sixty mu of sloping land Xiao Qin has leased is overgrown and lush, buzzing with bees and butterflies, pineapples and macadamia trees growing in symbiosis. It looks like a patch of untamed sanctuary that has no business existing here—and yet it gives us a glimmer of hope.

I. Coming Home

Xiao Qin was born in 1993. Though Han Chinese, he is as Xishuangbanna as they come. Having only just passed thirty, he has already been farming back home for four years and has carved out a name for himself in the ecological farming community, growing pineapples, passion fruit and macadamia nuts on a few dozen mu of land. Getting into agriculture was, in fact, something of an accident.

After graduating from university in 2015, Xiao Qin spent two years at a petrochemical company in Xishuangbanna, spending most of his time driving out to the villages to sell gas stoves. The pay was decent, his bosses were happy to promote him, but a longing to start his own thing never left him. ‘Back then, I was always watching The Wealth Guide on CCTV-7—my heart would race every single time!’ It was around that same period that his interest in farming first took root.

Thankfully, those television success stories never went to his head. Two years spent driving out to the villages taught him that conventional produce simply doesn’t fetch a fair price, and farmers have only one road ahead: race each other to bigger scale and higher yields. To squeeze as much as possible out of limited land, you have to spray. ‘You need at least four rounds of herbicide just to grow bananas—it’s too filthy.’

Before long, he even felt uneasy buying vegetables at the wet market. He began scouring the internet for anything about ecological farming, and in 2018 he finally quit his job and joined Harvest Share Ecological Farm in Shunyi, Beijing.

Perhaps it was the fearlessness of youth—barely out of his teens at the time—that made the twenty-something Xiao Qin think ecological growing techniques weren’t so hard after all. The real challenge, he felt, was finding the right market. At Harvest Share, he handled online customer service and occasionally tagged along on deliveries, which gave him a chance to get to know consumers and build up experience. After two years, he returned to Xishuangbanna as planned and became a returnee farmer.

The label always comes up when people introduce him, but Xiao Qin has never quite felt the word “returnee” fits. For those two years in Beijing, his body was there, but his mind was already home—the goal had always been to come back. His heart, he insists, never really left. All along he told himself: bring fresh experience and new resources back to Xishuangbanna. So quitting and heading home wasn’t swimming against the current—it was more like water finding its own course.

Farming is back-breaking work. Tending the fields, harvesting and processing, packing and shipping, handling after-sales queries—nothing comes easy. Whenever his parents worried and questioned his decision to come home, Xiao Qin would half-joke, ‘You’re the ones who really caused this, you know.’ He is grateful for the education his parents gave him: sending him to university, opening his eyes to a wider world—of course his thinking would change. So what if he chose an unconventional path?

A shared care for good food became another ground on which Xiao Qin and his parents could meet. Since he started farming ecologically, the family has eaten organic rice at every meal. The wonderful spread they laid out for us that day had a story behind every dish: peanuts, edamame and loofah grown by his mother; wild mushrooms and bee pupae foraged in the hills that season; free-range pork bought from a neighbour; and ecological fruits from fellow growers across the country. Truly enviable.

Earlier this year, Xiao Qin’s parents retired and, unable to wait, promptly carved out a little kitchen garden among the pineapples. They have been eating their own peanuts for a while now, and their sesame and sweet potatoes will be ready for harvest any day. On our visit, we caught them planting soybeans. His parents worked one behind the other, applying fertiliser, sowing the beans—and clearly enjoying every minute.

II. Going Wild

The plot Xiao Qin leased the year before last holds thirty thousand pineapple plants, not due to hit market until next summer. Looking at the rows of tall, uniform pineapple crowns, I couldn’t help asking Xiao Qin: is this really how close pineapples should be planted?

He laughed. ‘I once heard a teacher from Taiwan say: pineapples are afraid of ghosts. Plant them a little closer together, and since they’re all huddled up, they won’t be scared.’

‘Afraid of ghosts’ is, of course, just a joke. In truth, back in the 1970s, agricultural scientists in Taiwan proved through field trials that close planting can not only dramatically increase pineapple yields but also help suppress weeds and aid soil and water conservation, which is how single-row close planting became widespread. The Smooth Cayenne variety—the one most commonly grown on Xiao Qin’s land—was also originally introduced from Taiwan.

Using the same single-row close planting method, Xiao Qin’s ecological pineapples are smaller, with yields a third to a half lower than conventional ones. What sets them apart: he doesn’t force flowering, uses no chemical fertiliser or pesticide, waters nothing, and applies only sheep manure and compost made from green macadamia nut husks as base fertiliser. Apart from weeding five or six times a year, the pineapples are tended almost as if left wild.

Late September in Xishuangbanna brings comfortable temperatures, and the freshly cut grass laid between the rows gives off a clean, green fragrance. Xiao Qin says his guiding principle in the field is “weed the tops, leave the roots”. The grass does draw some nutrients away from the pineapples, but their roots help the pineapples retain moisture—the two are in a cooperative, symbiotic relationship. Cutting and laying grass as mulch insulates the soil, locks in moisture, and improves the local microclimate, which eases the pressure of drought to some extent.

‘The past two years have been very dry. From February to April this year, it barely rained at all.’ Faced with climate change, Xiao Qin is already feeling the pinch. He has dug a few small reservoirs in the field, but when the drought bites, they are little more than a drop in the ocean. He has also considered damming a ditch further down the slope to store water and pumping it up for irrigation, but he hasn’t reached an agreement with the neighbouring farmers yet. For now, all he can do is rely on the weather.

Then again, for fruit, drought isn’t all bad. Too much rain hinders sugar accumulation, and the flavour becomes less complex. ‘It’s like how people get puffy from water retention,’ Xiao Qin says. Come to think of it, this year’s pineapples really did have a full, rich flavour. They came from land belonging to his third aunt, a fallow hillside slope he took over the moment he returned in 2020.

If the sixty mu at Dadu’gang represent Xiao Qin’s ‘Pineapple 2.0’, that hillside was his rough-and-ready version 1.0—grass rampant, pineapples sparse. Back then, to save on seedlings, the pineapples were planted wide apart and in no particular order, so weeds had to be hacked back by hand with a sickle, making management a real nuisance. The slope was thirty or even forty-five degrees, enough to leave an ordinary person exhausted after standing there for a while, let alone working a full day under the blazing sun.

Xiao Qin hasn’t forgotten the friendships he made while selling gas stoves for a living. He tracked down two Jino friends who were still in farming, and the three of them went into partnership growing and managing passion fruit.

One of them, Saoqie, farms a plot even wilder than ‘Pineapple 1.0’—at the bottom of a valley with slopes of fifty or sixty degrees. You have to ride a motorbike to the roadside first, then climb down. Without a decent head for outdoor hiking, you simply can’t reach the plot. When we asked Saoqie why he chose to grow passion fruit there, he smiled and answered something only half-connected to the question: ‘We used to grow winter melon.’ We caught our breath and let it drop.

Xiao Qin is candid: the plots are too scattered to handle everything himself. Half his time and energy goes on the road, let alone on refining technique or quality control. So, when his venture entered its third year, he leased this sixty-mu plot near home, decided to consolidate his management, kept just one passion fruit plot, and intercropped it with macadamia nut trees.

III. Blazing a Trail

As one link in an alternative food network, ecological farming is not just a new way of growing—it demands rebuilding the infrastructure between producer and consumer so that both ends can work in sync.

Conventional produce is bulked up and ripened with chemical fertilisers and pesticides, sometimes not even fully ripe before they are treated with preservative techniques and shipped out. As for flavour—well, that gets patched up later, in processing, with additives. Ecological produce, by contrast, is grown without chemical fertiliser or pesticide, and is typically only picked and shipped once the fruit or vegetable has truly ripened, so the flavour comes through richer. That, in turn, presents ecological growers with a whole new set of challenges.

The same goes for processed foods. Made from heritage-variety wheat flour, can dried noodles actually hang and dry properly without salt? With less sugar, less oil and no additives, how do you keep a biscuit tasty yet uncrumbly? Stripped of artificial shortcuts, can ecological products do justice to the true taste of real food while still looking the part?

What has been troubling Xiao Qin for a while is passion fruit. Conventional passion fruit is treated with a preservative before shipping, but his goes straight from the grove to the courier. By the time it reaches the consumer, the flavour is as good as ever, yet the skin inevitably looks wrinkled and rough. Some buyers who don’t understand the produce, seeing the appearance, leave a negative review on the spot—even accuse the grower of sending substandard goods.

On this subject, Xiao Qin is rather embarrassed, and deeply grateful to the various collaborative platforms in the ecological food community for their understanding and patience—helping him find consumers who truly value ecological food, and handling customer complaints so he can focus on growing. With the backing of these knowledgeable, professional platforms and discerning consumers, Xiao Qin feels he owes it to them to hone his craft and tighten his quality control.

His macadamia nut processing, now approaching maturity, was built up one small experiment at a time. Macadamia nuts originated in Australia and have been grown in China for years. Here in Xishuangbanna, local farmers simply call them ‘the nuts’ and usually sell the raw fruit straight to middlemen or factories.

Xiao Qin spotted a gap in the ecological market that his hometown’s new “specialty” could fill. At first he sold the fresh nuts, but consumers up north weren’t familiar with them. Xu Liang, who liaises with growers at the Beijing Organic Farmers Market, suggested Xiao Qin try roasting and drying them himself. One experiment, and he hit on a bestseller. With no experience the first year, he borrowed the chestnut-roasting machine at the fruit shop in town—hopelessly slow. After roasting, the whole family would sit down together to crack each nut open, yet another laborious step. Over the past two years, he has gradually invested in a green-husk peeler, a colour sorter and a shell-cracking machine. With the colour sorter separating the large nuts from the small, roasting comes out even, and the roaster can better gauge the heat.

Xiao Qin popped yesterday’s freshly roasted macadamias into the shell-cracker and prepared us a custom batch to take back to Beijing. Crack open the hard shell, and the creamy-white kernel crunches under the teeth, its rich oils deeply satisfying—several times more fragrant than anything I’d tasted before. How does that milky aroma come about? I mused, smacking my lips.

‘Roasting macadamias in the shell brings out a natural creamy aroma all by itself! There’s absolutely no need for extra flavouring or additives,’ Xiao Qin said with pride. He scoffs at the ingredient list on a certain snack brand’s macadamia nuts. With over a thousand macadamia trees still to reach full bearing, the roasting process and quality control for his dried nuts have finally found a workable path.

IV. Rediscovering Place

Over the past two years, alongside his day-to-day production, Xiao Qin has also broadened his understanding of farming and biodiversity through public events and exchanges.

An exhibition at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, titled “Citizen Participation in Biodiversity Conservation”, left him deeply shaken. Field visits to Jino Mountain with the Farmers’ Seed Network also gave him a more direct understanding of the Jino people’s traditional ecological culture. It turns out that coming home isn’t just about bringing new resources and experience back—it’s also a process of rediscovering local knowledge.

If ever more young people like Xiao Qin head home—bringing ecological principles, exploring new models of production and consumption, tending the land and the community with care, and standing alongside their neighbours as dignified producers—surely the countryside of the future will be something quite different?

Foodthink Author

zeen

Foodthink Editor