Fourteen Years Back in the Village: At Last, I Farm

I. Almost Left

After so many years back in the village, there was a time when I seriously considered leaving for good. A few years ago, all the village fields were contracted out to large-scale growers. In our little Jiangnan “Chrysanthemum Village”, we were the only household still growing chrysanthemums and rice. There were slightly more families raising silkworms – besides us, just a handful scattered about.

Father asked hesitantly whether we should lease our fields out too.

He probably felt a little apologetic about getting in the large-scale growers’ way.

◉Click the image to read the story of how the author grew the village’s last mu of Hangzhou white chrysanthemums.

Since leaving Beijing and returning to the village in 2011, we have always stayed in our own village. Along the way, we went through several changes.

At first, the motivation was very simple – we just wanted to come back to our village and run a small ecological farm. In the picture I painted for myself, the farm would wrap right around our home, lush and teeming with life. Even then I knew ecological farming was hard money to make (though reportedly it could sustain a family), but living in an environment like that would have been reward enough (and this is why I envied Tang Liang). Still, for a twenty-five-year-old from a farming family with virtually no agricultural experience, no social experience, and not a penny to his name, utter failure was a foregone conclusion – in our own village, we couldn’t even lease a plot.

◉Tang Liang, a rural returnee from Jintang, Sichuan (back row, far left), put down roots with his whole family – something many returning peers who had faced setbacks envied, and something that opened up new imaginings of life for more young people. Click the image to read Tang Liang’s story. Photography: Tang Wei

After the farm dream fell apart, I headed to Huzhou, not far from home, where Old Shen grew ecological rice. I arrived in early spring and the fields were empty. His workers had left; only an elderly man in his eighties remained to keep an eye on things. Old Shen’s money was nearly gone too – he was searching for workers and for funding at the same time. One villager kept coming to pick fights, wanting to raise the land rent. Early spring in Jiangnan is truly cold and damp, especially in the hills. Before long, all ten of my fingers had broken out in chilblains. At night I would soak my feet for ages before daring to get into bed. In the small hours, Old Shen’s newborn son would often cry and fuss. The farm was barely holding on. A few months later, I left.

II. Finding a Village

When I picked up the returning-to-the-village dream again, it was already a year later. This time, instead of running a farm, I returned to the Jiangnan sericulture tradition and took up the craft of making silk duvets with my family. So for years, while most returning youth were out farming, we were actually making duvets. After a few years of silk duvets, we revived the ecological growing and traditional processing of Hangzhou white chrysanthemums on a single mu back in the village.

Throughout all this, as a “veteran” returning youth, I had seen far too many ecological farm startups fail. Besides, we never really saw returning to the village as a business venture – we had no ambition to scale up – so we never leased any land. We stuck to our own little plot of one mu and three-tenths (quite literally).

When people introduced “Meiheyu Farm”, I was embarrassed by how tiny it was, and the name felt a bit overstated. The year before last, we simply changed our company suffix from “Family Farm” to “Sericulture Culture”.

◉ In this 2023 podcast episode, Yu Jiangang looks back in detail on his experience of returning to the village to make silk duvets and grow Hangzhou white chrysanthemums. Click to listen.

We really did start looking for another village. We focused on the area to the northwest of the county town, as it was closer to where we lived and made it easier to drive the children to and from school. The idea was to leave our own village but not the sericulture region – to find somewhere with a similar culture so we could carry on with our work.

Honestly, after so many years in our own village, the constant pull of a close-knit society – with our parents, with our relatives – was exhausting. Sometimes you just need physical distance: out of sight, out of mind.

A calligraphy teacher recommended a village in Wuzhen, saying there was a house for rent with a large mulberry grove right next to it – perfect for us. But we were a step too late; by the time we got there, someone had already leased it as a warehouse.

There was another village that had long been planned as a place for “city folk” to start businesses; most of the original villagers had already been relocated. The company running it had been there for a few years and had ground to a near-standstill.

We also visited the village where a friend runs a teahouse. The villagers were all half-present, waiting for the big road to the west to be widened so they could finally collect the enormous compensation they had been anticipating.

My wife Yuhui found a house online, a fair distance from the main road. In front of it was a stretch of woodland. Looking closer, I could see that beneath the trees were row after row of withering mulberry trees – once the landlord had stopped raising silkworms, she had planted saplings instead. She said that if we wanted to raise silkworms, she would let us use all her silkworm trays. But at the time there were still construction workers renting the place, and we would have to wait until the end of the year.

The moment Yuhui realised that this three-storey house (and the mulberry grove) would need to be cleaned, renovated, and tidied – an enormous drain on one’s mental energy – she politely turned the landlord down.

After that, on and off, I went back to the “city-folk entrepreneurship village” a few more times, just to see if any suitable houses had come up.

There was a poorly performing guesthouse for sale, and Yuhui called to arrange a viewing. I said, “You’re not thinking of running a guesthouse, are you?” She said, “No – a guesthouse doesn’t need to be renovated from scratch; we could use it straight away as a silk duvet workshop.”

We then asked the management company whether they had any land left. They had one plot, 3,000 yuan a mu a year. Why so expensive? Because that plot could accommodate playground equipment for visitor experiences. I’m not doing playgrounds – I just want to farm normally. Well, then there’s nothing left; all the regular plots have been leased out by the company to grow tobacco.

I don’t remember whether that was the last village we visited. Either way, the urge to leave kept spreading.

◉ In a long essay about how he and his wife Mei Yuhui returned to the village to start their venture, Yu Jiangang also describes the various models of rural construction around him. Click the image to read more.

III. A Familiar Stranger

It wasn’t until autumn 2024 that this season’s osmanthus silkworm batch in the village was suddenly struck by mass poisoning. The villagers all said it was directly linked to drone spraying on the large-scale growers’ contracted rice paddies. We simply couldn’t bear to watch the last handful of silkworm households give up altogether – after all, this was a village tradition stretching back centuries! After several rounds of negotiation with the large-scale growers and the village head, we finally agreed to take over the 14 mu of rice paddies beside the mulberry groves and farm them ecologically.

The problem was, I didn’t have much experience growing rice, let alone ecological cultivation.

Rice was truly a familiar stranger.

I remembered third grade, when Mother dragged me into the paddy for rice transplanting and, “fierce” as she could muster, threw down a line: “You’re a farmer – you can’t even grow a thing! Who’s going to feed you?” But Mother herself never imagined that what eventually kept our whole family afloat wasn’t farming at all – it was both of them slaving away in factories. And with one school after another, I never had another chance to properly master rice transplanting.

◉Mother never quite approved, but she supported my dream of returning to the village through hard labour, every single day. Click the image to read the author’s essay about his mother.

The last time I farmed before leaving home was the summer after the gaokao. I was transplanting rice in the dusk while my homeroom teacher called, and called again, desperate for my results.

After that last round of transplanting, I went off to university in Jilin, then to work in Beijing, and never set foot in a paddy again. After I quit my job in 2011, I did rural public-welfare work in Longzhou, Guangxi, and did work alongside villagers on a rice-and-duck project: observing golden apple snails in the paddies, distributing ducklings, keeping a watchful eye for any sneaky pesticide use. But apart from that, I never truly worked a field.

◉While in Longzhou, Guangxi, I followed the village’s former Party secretary out to herd cattle. Click the image to read about the author’s return to Longzhou after more than a decade.

The months I spent at Old Shen’s ecological farm happened to fall during the winter fallow. The paddies lay bare and empty, and I never worked a field. The one exception was after I’d already gone back to work in Shanghai – unable to let go, I returned to the village every weekend to farm. I grew one mu of ecological rice. But it fell victim to sheath blight later on, and the harvest was bleak.

IV. The Agri-Supply Jungle

When it came to actually planning 15 mu of ecological rice, the challenges were no small feat. Just the sheer range of agricultural inputs was dazzlingly bewildering!

Compared with over a decade ago, the market now offers a vast array of commercial organic fertilisers. Pelleted organic fertiliser, applied by drone, is far more efficient than traditional methods.

A local manufacturer pushes an “organic slow-release fertiliser” whose description promises “extracting lignin, cellulose, alginic acid, and chitin – natural macromolecular organic compounds – from crop residues such as straw, then modifying and activating them.” But dig a little deeper and you find its organic-matter content is just 15% (the standard requires above 30%). Look at the production standard it references – GB 15063-2020 – and you’ll see it’s actually a compound fertiliser!

Even among certified organic fertilisers, there are countless varieties. By form: powdered, pelleted, or bulk bags; by production standard: general organic fertiliser (NY/T 525-2021) or bio-organic fertiliser (NY 884-2012); prices can vary tenfold – 400–500 yuan per ton at the cheap end, 4,000–5,000 yuan per ton at the top. The one thing that is never in question: you can never find out where the materials actually come from – or even what they are; the details are perpetually vague.

If you want government subsidies, you must buy from manufacturers on the government’s approved subsidy list.

After all that comparison, we ended up choosing the “ancient” rapeseed cake. Its source is crystal clear, it’s made right here locally, and it saves the long-haul transport. Of course, that also means it can’t easily be spread by machine, and no subsidies are available.

The most exasperatingly absurd thing was the seedling trays. We had commissioned an organic farm in Suzhou to raise our seedlings, and not until the day before rice transplanting did we discover that Suzhou uses 9-inch trays while ours are 7-inch. Different sizes – the transplanting machine is useless!

◉After much deliberation, we abandoned all commercial fertilisers and went with traditional rapeseed cake – fertilizer that can only be spread by hand.

V. Weed and Pest Control Strategy

From February to mid-June, I was endlessly drafting and revising the growing plan. I travelled to Zhenjiang, Wuzhong, Yichang, Ningbo, Kunshan, and other places, seeking farming wisdom from rice specialists, returning youth, and ecology mentors. We settled on a basic weed-control strategy first:

1 Before planting, flood the field to give weeds an ideal warm, wet environment; wait for one or two flushes of weeds, then till and plant;

2 Transplant the seedlings – no direct seeding;

3 The field must be perfectly level, so that after transplanting and flooding, weeds struggle to establish.

We also set a pest-control strategy:

1 Space the seedlings further apart for better airflow;

2 Plant flower strips along the field edges to attract natural predators;

3 Expect more insects in the first year; once spiders arrive in the second, things should settle;

4 As an absolute last resort, use microbial agents / biopesticides.

But I had forgotten: the essence of farming is uncertainty … The first weed-control rule says to let weeds grow before transplanting – but really, that calls for fallowing the previous autumn and winter.

The large-scale grain grower who had the field before me planted wheat as the previous crop. Harvest normally comes around 20 May. So with transplanting in mid-to-late June, that leaves barely a month – not enough time for weeds to grow up.

As if the world knew I was about to farm, this year’s wheat harvest ran a full week later than usual! The moment the wheat was in, I urgently called a tractor operator I knew to do rotary tillage, only to find he was flat-out helping a 2,000-mu operation with wheat harvest and land preparation. As it turned out, every tractor driver in town was busy harvesting and tilling for the large-scale growers!

After all the phone calls were done and the field finally tilled, it was already 31 May – Dragon Boat Festival!

◉The relentless summer heat of 2025 made this year’s rice-farming journey even harder. The high that day was 38°C – we had to be out in the fields before the sun came up.

◉We don’t call it a day until the sun goes down and darkness closes in.

VI. Hand-Weeding the Paddies

Whether you farm ecologically or conventionally, you need a tractor. A modern tractor can cost hundreds of thousands of yuan at the very least, so smallholders and family farms like ours have no choice but to rely on agricultural machinery cooperatives. Only once I started growing rice did I realise that even the way tractors are operated has been profoundly shaped by large-scale conventional farming. The most obvious casualty is land levelling.

Chinese traditional farming places enormous emphasis on levelling the paddy. According to my dad, the field should be “as smooth as a mirror”. Only a perfectly level paddy allows you to control weeds through irrigation, giving the rice a head start from day one.

Large-scale conventional rice cultivation, reliant on heavy herbicide use, no longer places much emphasis on levelling. Tractor operators, too, prioritise speed over precision, and the technique and quality of their work are barely adequate.

The consequence of that lost craft is that we hand-weeded four full rounds across the field, stooped and bending, with some patches going five. The character “yun” in the word “gengyun” – till and weed – simply means pulling up the weeds and trampling them into the mud.

◉Hand-weeding like this: across 15 mu, we went through four or five rounds.

◉A comparison of hand-weeded paddies and unweeded ones.

As a farmer chasing a harvest, I don’t want to – and simply cannot – casually toss off airy words like “coexistence with weeds”.

For most of those 38-degree days spent hunched and stooping, I genuinely hated the weeds. Then, at some point – probably the day pulling weeds had me on the verge of despair – I suddenly felt the urge to look up what they were called. And just like that, my attitude towards them changed.

Every single weed has a name: Leersia hexandra, prostrate water-primrose, ear-leaved ammannia, Rotala rotundifolia, three-angled rush, Monochoria vaginalis. Moreover, they are all medicinal herbs too – prostrate water-primrose, for instance, clears heat and detoxifies, promotes diuresis and eases strangury, resolves blood stasis and stops bleeding, and is used to treat dysentery, infectious hepatitis, nephritic oedema, cystitis, carbuncles, boils and furuncles, and bites from snakes and insects.

I plan to study these paddy weeds in far greater detail from now on.

◉Clockwise from top left: prostrate water-primrose, barnyard grass, pulled weeds tied into bundles, and ear-leaved ammannia.

VII. Pest and Silkworm, One and the Same

The most dramatic chapter came with the insects. As hand-weeding got underway, rice leaf rollers and striped stem borers appeared first; then came sheath blight and rice planthoppers; the leaf rollers and stem borers kept turning over generation after generation.

What were we supposed to do?

We started with blue and yellow sticky insect traps – the results were middling.

◉We put blue and yellow sticky insect traps in the field first, but they didn’t do much.

I saw an ecological farming friend eventually turn to a microbial agent – permitted under organic farming standards. I figured I would keep one on standby, ready to use as a last resort (the spiders in the first year probably wouldn’t be enough).

But while I was reading through the product details, I found to my horror that the agent was designed specifically to kill Lepidoptera – and silkworms are Lepidoptera!

Well, come to think of it, it makes sense. I had even kept a rice leaf roller and a striped stem borer in a jar, just to observe their habits. In the end, after pupation and emerging from their cocoons, they turned into moths with bright, lively eyes. Aren’t those moths essentially the same creatures as silkworm moths!

◉The moths in the paddy and the silkworm moth look nearly identical – yet human opinion of them is utterly split down the middle.

And so we decided to skip even the microbial agent – go au naturel.

“Going au naturel”, the paddy grew well all the same, right through to a bumper harvest around Lidong, the Start of Winter.

The foundation of our success, I think, can be summed up as “three fields, six characters”: patrolling, sun-drying, and hand-weeding.

◉Washing my feet in the little stream after each morning’s patrol.

Patrolling means making a round of the field every morning before the sun comes up. The main thing to watch is the water. At night, loach, crayfish, and eels burrow through the soil, punching holes in the paddy bund – and all the water drains right out. Once the sun is up, weed seeds begin to germinate. Patrolling means spotting leaks in good time, patching the holes, and refilling.

Sun-drying happens around early August, before the rice enters the jointing stage. The opposite of patrolling and refilling, sun-drying means draining the paddy completely and leaving the soil to bake in the sun until cracks appear. This forces the roots deeper into the ground, making the plants less prone to lodging and generally healthier.

Hand-weeding differs from simple weeding: it’s not enough just to pull the weeds out – you trample them into the mud, so the weeds turn into fertiliser for the rice. Two birds, one stone.

VIII. The Return Dream Fulfilled

Looking back on a full year of growing rice: seedlings raised on 10 May, transplanting on 20 June, four rounds of hand-weeding in between, and every obstacle nature could throw – weeds, insects, typhoons, heatwaves, fungal disease, drought – and then, at last, a smooth harvest on 5 November, the completion of a rice plant’s nearly 180-day life cycle. As humans we had poured in plenty of labour, but so often it was nature alone who did the real work – the sunlight, the rain, the warm winds, the soil, the birds and beasts – brewing the harvest into being. One cannot help but marvel at nature’s power! The main variety gave us a yield of fresh paddy at around 1,000 jin (500 kg) per mu, with a soft, sticky, sweet flavour in the cooked grain. I am quite happy with that, and I take pride in what we achieved.

◉We got to eat rice grown with our own two hands.

Fourteen years back in the village, once teetering on the edge of leaving. In the end, we not only stayed but did something “unprecedented” – leasing land for the very first time. Added to our own one mu, that made a “wholly unprecedented” fifteen-mu ecological rice farm – sitting right outside our front window!

Was this not, in essence, the plain, hazy, beautiful wish that brought us home fourteen years ago?

Thank you, silkworms!

◉This year we will keep growing rice on these fifteen mu right outside our front door.

First draft: 9 February 2026 – the 22nd day of the twelfth month in the Yisi Year of the Snake

Revised: 23 February 2026 – the 7th day of the first month in the Bingwu Year of the Horse

Foodthink author

Yu Jiangang

Born and raised in Zhenghebang, a silk village in Jiangnan. After graduating from university in 2008, he took a job in brand consultancy in Beijing. Drawn by concern for “Three Rurals” issues, he resigned in 2011 and became an intern at Little Donkey Farm. He then spent time doing volunteer rural-construction work in Zhuang ethnic villages along the Guangxi–Vietnam border. Back in the village, he and his wife, Mei Yuhui, founded Meiheyu, producing artisan silk duvets and passing on the craft, with the hope of revitalising China’s intangible sericultural heritage and creating new traditions. WeChat public account: Meiheyu; Podcast: Tuanli Jiegou

All images supplied by the author unless otherwise noted

Editor: Tianle