Coming Home to Farm: Before Tilling the Land, First Learn to “Cultivate the Heart’s Field”

II. Starting the Family Enterprise: Cultivate the Heart’s Field Before Building a Farm

In the first year, I worked with my elder uncle and younger uncle on our contracted land plots, experimenting with ecological growing; in the second year, I rented some land and expanded to over 20 mu, and my mother persuaded my father and my brother’s family to stay in the village; in the third year, we built a new house spacious enough for the whole family to live in, and my mother closed her tea house and came home to manage the household.

Yet beyond growing and running the business, the harder challenge of coming home to start a farm was the internal drain within the family itself. Every family has its own difficult scripture to recite, and once you are back, long-standing tensions can stir up all manner of problems. In our household, the misunderstandings and friction between my parents and me, between my parents themselves, and between my father and my younger uncle all had to be gradually worked through.

To begin with, from my parents’ point of view, they had always hoped we would find work in the city, yet here we were, back to till the land (without pesticides or chemical fertilisers, at that). As far as they were concerned, I had “studied myself silly”. For my parents’ generation, the reason they had left for migrant work was that they believed life in the countryside could never be a good one; for them, the village and farming were a source of heartache. (My father, in particular, would blame me the moment he was in a bad mood: “Why on earth did you come back to the countryside?”) To help untie that knot, whenever I set up a stall at a community market or hosted farm visits, I made sure my parents had the chance to chat with others. Approval from outsiders carried far more weight than anything I could explain or persuade them of. I also took them to events and workshops, and on visits to other farms. They went from being too shy to speak in public to gradually opening up, realising that farming could actually be done this way, and finding a sense of confidence in being farmers.

And I, for my part, did not understand at first why my parents played mahjong. But then I thought about it: at their age, they don’t have many spiritual pursuits. Working in the mornings and playing cards in the afternoons is their inner life. Something that looks simple to you may not be simple from his or her point of view; at times like that, creating conflict won’t solve anything, and lecturing only makes things worse.

Secondly, although we were all under the same roof, we had long been starved of emotional connection. Domestic life and daily labour are indispensable parts of a family farm, so the growth of the crops in the fields and the emotional well-being of each family member both need tending.

Once I tried to take my parents—by then completely at odds—to a wellness retreat together, but neither would go with the other. I spoke to each of them separately; after a great deal of patient pleading, they finally agreed to attend. Though they still barely acknowledged each other on the way there, a few days later they were chatting and laughing. My father and my younger uncle used to quarrel the moment they saw one another; a single look could send them slamming down chopsticks and throwing bowls. After my uncle came back, the tensions flared up easily again. Once, both felt so wronged that they broke into tears. I held my younger uncle and cried with him for a while, helping him release what had been bottled up. This kind of “emotional labour” is the lubricant that keeps a family running smoothly.

For a while, my partner Lizi and I were each so caught up in farm affairs and community work that, although we were always in the same space, we barely talked to each other. Eventually we made a change: we couldn’t be this busy—we needed to set aside some time for ourselves, and we needed to create a little space to communicate. Once that connection is re-established, both partners are more present, and that in turn affects the children and everyone else in the house. How a particular issue is handled ripples through the household mood. A small dispute over something as trivial as washing the dishes can erupt into conflict, but handled well, it becomes a way for family members to help one another grow.

When soil particles are simply pressed together in a scattered, uneven way, that is compaction; only when the soil forms a soil aggregate structure—when it is in good condition—can it yield better plants and better food. Our family, too, needs a “soil aggregate structure”: if people lack the right kind of connection and remain atomised, the household atmosphere becomes rigid and stiff; only with the right emotional connections can a family overcome its own “compaction” and feel alive and warm.

Finally, to change people’s habits and mindset, the only way is to lead by example first and gradually influence the family over time. After all, a family is not a business—you cannot issue orders or impose fines. When we first started sorting waste, the household was unanimously against it—my father especially. So I just went ahead and did it myself. Sometimes when I generated food scraps out at a market, I would bring them home to compost. Gradually more people joined in, and after about half a year I noticed my father had started sorting his rubbish too. When my parents went out to play mahjong, they would come back carrying sugarcane pulp and rind with them.

Some people ask: how much capital does it take to start an ecological farm? We didn’t have much income back then—just ¥30,000. Most of that went into infrastructure: building livestock housing, constructing roads, and renovating the house. We also had to run network cables and build a biogas digester, all done by hand. We hired two craftsmen to straighten an old pig sty that had begun to lean, so we could keep using the existing infrastructure without pouring all our money in at once. It was a low-cost way of running the business, and in the early days that was especially important. Later, the government also provided some support for infrastructure projects—roads, biogas digesters, drip irrigation systems, drones, and so on.

Our choice of crops can be described as a “pyramid production structure”: at the top sit the main cash crops sold for monetary income, while the base consists of everything grown for household consumption—self-sufficient and greatly reducing living costs. In the first year, I experimented with small plots of different crops, selling through online channels. In the second year, I chose small yellow ginger and chillies—two varieties easy to store and process—as our flagship products. We gradually built up a customer base and established stable supply relationships with community shops, traditional Chinese medicine clinics, and the like, using “contract farming” to plan our planting scale.

On the farm, there are roughly 100 varieties large and small, though we’ve never counted them precisely. Of the total output from the fields, about one-third is cycled on-site for the household and visiting friends, about one-third is distributed through our network of platform partners, and roughly one-third is sold through the farm’s WeChat shop.

Our income rose steadily in the first few years. As the farm settled into a stable operation, annual output value hovered around ¥300,000–¥400,000, with net income close to ¥200,000. 2023 was an exception: affected by reduced harvests caused by the extreme heat and drought of 2022, agricultural product income fell noticeably. We had also undertaken significant infrastructure construction in the second half of 2022, so fixed-asset depreciation in 2023 was higher than in previous years, pushing income down considerably.

Farm labour relies primarily on family members; when we’re stretched too thin, we bring in neighbours from nearby villages on a temporary basis. Currently, the farm has six full-time workers (not counting my elder uncle and younger uncle). Of these, field production accounts for roughly three person-equivalents, while logistics and business operations account for another three.

Drawing on each family member’s strengths and inclinations, we have gradually settled into a stable division of labour. My father focuses on hands-on fieldwork; my younger brother handles production management and operates the agricultural machinery. My sister-in-law serves mainly as his assistant, while my mother works alongside my father in the fields and also takes on some logistical tasks. My wife, Lizi, designs the farm’s layout, oversees the children’s education, tends to the farm’s aesthetics, and leads cultural learning activities. My elder uncle helps with weeding in the fields, and my younger uncle feeds the animals and sweeps the yard. The two of them are getting on in years, but they lend a hand while enjoying life at their own pace, finding a way that suits them to belong in this household. Everything else on the farm—overall planning and operations, technical learning, production trials, and external sales—falls to me.

Within the household, we allocate income using a work-point system: each person’s earnings are theirs to spend, each nuclear family’s finances remain largely independent (couples can coordinate between themselves), and the younger members, who have higher expenses, earn a little more.

The farm’s income is modest, and we have no ambition to expand our scale or capture a larger market share. From a market perspective, chasing size and breadth would demand heavy capital investment in construction, leaving us exposed to cash-flow problems when sales slump; planning production around our actual needs provides a buffer against those risks. From a labour perspective, the workload of a family farm stays within what our family can manage, keeping our schedule flexible. From the perspective of what agriculture means, I know this is not a trade that makes big money. Rather than growing bigger and stronger, we care more about making the farm and our family more beautiful, more alive.

2. Touching the Soil: Working with Nature Firsthand

The “home” we speak of in “building the family enterprise” is not just a home for humans—it also includes the land, the home of other living creatures.

Our local soil is yellow clay, which isn’t particularly good and needs to be slowly cultivated and improved. Sometimes we find ourselves thinking about how to grow more, cut costs, and optimise management—all from an economic standpoint. But when you truly settle in, you begin to feel your relationship with the land. The land is home to microorganisms—with them, without them, farming is a completely different affair. It is also home to insects.

Agricultural production requires keeping a constant eye on the weather. In recent years, the number of extremely hot days has continued to rise. In 2022 there was a severe drought; in areas without shade netting, the ginger gradually died, and watering only made things worse. Many farms suffered total crop failure, and our small yellow ginger yield dropped by half, which had a major impact on 2023 income. The average temperature in 2023 was one degree higher than usual, though there was no prolonged heatwave or drought. In recent years, we have therefore been discussing how to mitigate the effects of climate change, and production decisions now factor this in more. Over the next year or two, we plan to gradually rebuild our reserves by cutting back on some external expenditure. As long as the foundation is there and our internal cycles remain intact, we have a wider buffer against external fluctuations.

It has taken me more than a decade of farming to truly appreciate that the choice of what to grow is intimately bound up with local soil and climate. Finding the right rhythm with both can feel like a kind of harmony between heaven and earth.

3. Farming and Reading: Cultivating the Land as a Way of Life

Hardship and tedium—that was the common perception of farming in the past. But if farming is more than a livelihood and becomes a way of life, you begin to feel the rhythm of the land and an aesthetic in everyday living.

On the one hand, we can change our working environment. For instance, we plant flowers among the crops (which also serves ecological and pest-prevention purposes), and it feels as though we are working in a garden—this gradually shifts your state of mind. On the other hand, farming is not all there is to our lives. We hold family meetings and farm meetings—sometimes about operations and technique, sometimes about everyday life—and we read classics together. During family meetings, we talk about recent difficulties, uncertainties, and how we are feeling, which deepens understanding among family members. We also go out to learn and attend events. For example, my younger brother had left school after junior high with unfinished education, and while running the farm he found the opportunity to enrol at a vocational college to study agricultural machinery. Once, seven of us travelled to Shanxi for a learning trip—the children attended a rural summer camp while the parents joined a wellness retreat. We create these opportunities so that everyone can feel a sense of personal growth.

Compiled by: Anael

Edited by: ZX