Learning to Be a Living Seed in the Countryside

I have written about the people who live close to the land and how tightly they embrace the earth. I have heard the whisper of wind sweeping across wheat fields in films, and read of the deep bond between farmers and the soil, yet I could never feel the countryside and the land through the food I put into my body each day. Sometimes this contradiction produced in me a cognitive dissonance I could not name.

This spring, I signed up for Foodthink‘s “Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme” and made my way to Yinlin Farm in Conghua, Guangzhou. Passing beyond the supermarket shelves, the warehouses, and the cold chain, I set out to step onto real land — to understand the food upon it and the memories of life it carries.

From the old districts of Guangzhou to Yinlin Village was a slow journey. Only when the roadside greenery outside the car window fell away — wild grass stubbornly pushing through the cracks in the concrete, the trees growing ever more varied — did I truly feel the breath of the countryside. The moment I stepped off the bus, the April heat rolled over me, accompanied by the drone of swarming insects. I felt my whole body wake up. The vivid days of my life at the farm in Guangzhou began right then.

I. Chickens, Birds, and Blueberry Trees

The blueberries were right in the midst of the harvest, and it was not only people treading the plastic mulch film — there were clucking hens, too. The valley chickens would leave the henhouse, scamper across the grass, leap towards the blueberry trees, and stroll among the young saplings, waiting in rapt attention for a berry to fall. A blueberry drops — knocked loose by a passing arm or shoulder — and the landing must be thunderous, because in an instant a whole flock of hens comes sprinting over, sharp beaks flapping open, quarrelling over the prize. In time, the hens learned to follow people about. Whenever someone drew near, they hurried after them, and if the person paused, they pecked at the shoes for a hint. Walk down a picking lane, let your limbs brush the branches, and ripe blueberries will tumble to the ground. Follow a person, get fruit — that was the hens’ consensus in May.

The movement of chickens is taken seriously in Permaculture as well: Let the chickens move! Let them eat overwintering pests in spring, fallen ripe fruit in summer, glean spilled grain in autumn — scratching at the topsoil only makes it looser. Perhaps we ought to learn to look at the land from the hens’ perspective. After spending enough time roaming outdoors, the hens developed habits of their own. They liked to leave droppings everywhere. The blue-black chicken manure after a meal of blueberries gleamed in the sun, and we often felt it was a way for the blueberries to return to the soil, too. Occasionally, under a blueberry tree, we would find a small pit with smooth inner walls, a few dead leaves at the bottom, and a hen still hovering nearby. We figured the hen had scratched it out, and an egg had once fallen onto those leaves.

The density of the blueberry trees also attracted fruit-eating birds. For a time we tried driving them off with birdcalls piped through a loudspeaker, but the gulf between one species’ language and another’s far exceeded our comprehension, and the birdsong never faltered on account of it. Blueberry trees love light, so on the lower slopes in the rain-soaked month of April you could hardly find a single berry; only in certain spots on the upper slopes might you glimpse two or three. The birds always beat us to the ripe blueberries at the summit, calling “tweet-tweet” from the thickets as they gorged themselves. Chickens you can see; birds you can only hear. Eyes tracking the sound find nothing but bare, empty branches. By the end of April, the blueberries on the hilltop were growing wild and free, and the birds cried out all the more gleefully. This drove Ma Shifu and the aunties to hide among the blueberry bushes too, combing in every direction for traces left by the greedy birds. Sometimes you climbed the hill and had not yet spotted anyone, yet heard Ma Shifu’s shouts first.

Ma Shifu would press her palms together into a megaphone shape and bellow “hoo-doo-doo”, sometimes “hoo-loo-loo”, to scare the birds away. She said it was a birdcall; we were sceptical, but sure enough, after a round of those sounds, the fruit-eating birds would fall quiet for a while. In May, rain lay everywhere across the hills — the weather and our moods were equally muddy. The blueberries, soaked with too much rain, turned watery, and more of them were beaten down to the ground. Neither the birds nor the hens could eat them fast enough, so all of it went back to the soil. By the time June was winding down, the blueberries were gone. The lychee trees in the valley had set fruit, and the birds and hens drifted back to the lychees, though the sand pits remained beneath the blueberry trees.

Early summer at Yinlin, and the wild grasses grew with furious abandon. We weeded in the fields, the sun searing our skin, the roar of the brush cutter ringing in our ears, our noses gradually adapting to the compost heap’s mingled smells, grass clippings clinging to every part of us, our hair left carrying the tangy green smell of the field. Our trouser legs, too, collected plenty of beggar’s-tick seeds — tiny barbed hooks snagging on the fabric, hitching a ride with us to more places, then taking root and sprouting fast in unfamiliar ground, slender and luxuriant.

The world as seen through a beggar’s-tick’s eyes must be vertical and three-dimensional. Its roots probe downward into the dark and damp, its stems chase upward toward sunlight and wind, while its seeds reach out horizontally in every direction, catching rides on anything that moves, exploring ever more territory. It entrusts its future, without reservation, to us passing souls.

The black goats are our “colleagues” in weeding here at the farm, though they eat almost anything, which causes considerable trouble for our other colleagues. They like to appear in small groups of two or three, silent, like a drifting shadow of black. Working alongside the black goats is both a joy and a worry. In the morning, we might feel gratified that they have stripped clean a patch of weeds; by afternoon, we may discover with heartbreak that a colleague’s freshly planted seedlings or flourishing herbs have also become their feast. The black goats’ true favourite, though, is beggar’s-ticks. They are connoisseurs of wild greens, bypassing the tough, coarse old grasses, using their nimble lips to pluck precisely the very tip, the freshest and most tender leaf — the part where the beggar’s-ticks hold the most vigour, preparing to flower and set seed.

Once, a farm colleague called Huang Xing followed the black goats, picked fresh, tender beggar’s-ticks, and took them into the kitchen. Served at the table, those beggar’s-ticks tasted wonderful, carrying a faint, grassy astringency. We playfully dubbed such tender beggar’s-ticks the “Black Goat’s Premium Pick”. Huang Xing said, perhaps this is how it ought to be — eating what grows between earth and sky, just like the black goats.

III. Maize Like Water

In May, the farm’s maize came into harvest through the storms. Doing the arithmetic, this batch of maize arrived on this land at almost the same time I did — so they are, in a sense, my contemporaries. In the field, an experienced auntie needs only a pinch of the maize ear to know whether the kernels are plump enough to qualify as “first grade” (the farm grades its produce by appearance: first grade, second grade, reject). I was in awe of this skill — I still needed to turn a cob over carefully all the way around before I could confirm whether any kernels were missing. In the days that followed, maize practically took possession of our stomachs.

The world of maize, as we see it in the city, is always presented with kernels golden and plump, kernel by kernel. I had never considered that it, too, could be incomplete, shaped by wind and rain: at the top of the maize stalk, the tassel must sway in the wind to scatter its pollen downward onto the ears below. The silks on each ear catch the dust — every single silk nurturing one kernel. Yet days of relentless rain soaked the silks through, blocking this pollination altogether.

Picture it: on the cob, the kernels should pack tightly into the limited space, forming a perfect tessellation. But when pollination fails, it is as though a vessel of water suddenly springs a crack — order dissolves. The kernels begin to “flow” outward toward the free edges, spreading apart. Every single kernel is a living seed.

Thinking back to supermarket shelves or fresh-food apps, maize seemed a paragon of industrial aesthetics: perfectly straight, kernels plump to golden-ratio precision, a bright-yellow still-life sculpture proclaiming the flawless order shaped by capital. At the farm, however, a cob’s journey from field to table never stops, and as it transforms from a living seed into food, its forms are varied: curved, petite, missing kernels on one side and plump on the other… Farm maize is liquid — it breathes on the land, grows, and changes shape.

“But this is the kind of maize that’s sweeter, with deeper flavour!” laughed Brother Feng, who had spent years at a film-and-television company before returning to the countryside. He casually picked up another cob, peeled back the husk, and revealed the kernels of varying sizes packed across its surface.

IV. Trees That Baffle

At dusk after the rain, from Pengcheng Life Farm right next to Yinlin Farm, you can watch Yinlin Village at its most beautiful moment. Standing on high ground, the entire village seems to bathe in a resplendent sunset. Close at hand, lychee trees still beaded with rain are scattered here and there, red dots climbing the branches, stirring both delight and longing. I walk between them with Teacher Pengcheng, who patiently answers my questions about cultivars, maintenance, and the small sandbags hanging from the branches. The way he furrows his brow in thought reminds me of those ancient, silent trees on the hill — when a person has long been rooted in one patch of land, tending trees with care, they may, in some instant, live themselves into becoming a tree.

Pengcheng told me that in earlier years, while practising natural farming, he had attempted “dwarfing” on the lychee trees, hanging half-bags of sand at the tips of the branches to pull them away from the sky. “Shorten the distance nutrients have to travel, let more light through, and fruit set should improve too.” Sitting at the tea table, Pengcheng talked through these years of experiments, a note of resignation in his voice. “The results, though… well, less than ideal.” He raised a finger toward a lychee tree in the distance. “Look at that Huaizhi — it was planted originally just to block pesticide drifting over from next door. We never tended it, let it grow wild. Yet this year it has fruited more heavily than ever.” He laughed softly. “Trees — truly, they can’t be figured out.”

This year, he is planning once again to use enzyme-based farming — harnessing the enzymes and mixed microbial communities produced by fermentation to protect and nourish the fruit trees. Whether it will work is yet to be seen; everything is still being explored. In quieter moments, Pengcheng once told a story about having a “dialogue” with all living things. The farm had long been plagued by termites, which spread from the trunks of lychee trees all the way to corners of the kitchen. One quiet afternoon, Pengcheng resolved to open his heart and earnestly tell the termites about recent troubles, his worries, and the boundaries of their coexistence. The termites remained busy as ever, and he sheepishly gave up. Yet the next day, the termites on the main trunk had unexpectedly dwindled; a few days later, they had retreated from the trunk altogether, even abandoning the nests they had built. In those scattered words, the intention seeking respect and understanding seemed, at last, to have truly carried across.

V. Lychees Off the Branch

Not far from Pengcheng Farm, the twin hills of Liuzhai and Lizhai bear the footprints of several generations. One day, while following the local aunties to pick lychees, they began, out of kindness towards my curiosity about the blueberry fields’ past, to recount this land’s history: their fathers had felled trees and cleared the hillsides; their fathers’ fathers had hunted in these mountains; and they themselves had planted lychee trees for land reclamation thirty or forty years ago. The land has changed hands several times in recent years, and now blueberry trees carpet almost the entire valley. Only in the ancient lychee woodland at the foot of the slopes, and on the scattered old lychee trees at the summit, can you still taste the flavour of time.

The Nuomizi and Guiwei lychee trees before us were planted by the aunties back when they first cleared the land. Guo Rui, who runs Yinlin Farm, studies the thick, gnarled roots and reckons the trees must be fifty years old. But the aunties, who were there, are sure of it: “Fifty? Not a chance! They went in on a good day in the eighties — thirty years, that’s it!” They and Guo Rui are spry, and in a few agile moves they are up on the broad branches, snipping off laden boughs with practised cuts. Down below, you must keep a watchful eye: one careless second and you could be struck by a falling lychee, a snapped branch, or even a wasp’s nest or a bird’s nest hanging between the twigs. And the fruits perched highest on the branches, closest to the sky, are always the most intensely flavoured.

These lychee trees are my age — both planted on this planet at the tail end of the twentieth century, only meeting twenty-five years later on this fertile ground. For Guo Rui, however, learning to care for the twenty-odd lychee trees his parents planted is a task he must face.

For years, Guo Rui has practised the “non-action” way of natural farming with his own lychee trees: letting them grow freely, intervening as little as possible, and above all, observing them continually. He points to a strip of bare, scarred bark on the trunk. “This tree had a whole swathe of bark chewed away by insects. Once we spotted it, we cut off the branches and leaves at the crown, let the sunlight pour down, and that drove the pests off. But the fruit it bore that year was sour and astringent — the quality was terrible.” Imagine the veins through which the tree carries its sap run thick with blockage, and the sourness and astringency pooling inside the fruit: the lychees of that year were like tears rolling down, one by one, from the tree’s eyes. Now, new bark is healing slowly upward from the edges of the wound, gradually knitting over the old scar.

Guo Rui recalls that the stretch of green lawn in front of the café was once thick with citrus trees, the twenty-odd lychees planted in between. A lychee tree takes seven or eight years before it fruits, so to fill the long gap, the previous generation had counted on the citrus for income. In a conversation with Brother Zhong, another elderly villager, we pieced together the shifting crop history of Yinlin Village. Before Huanglongbing struck, in the 1980s, the village was blanketed with groves of citrus; and before citrus took over wholesale, the original crop was paddy rice. Today, though, the price of lychees falls far short of the labour cost of picking them, and the villagers have gone out to find other livelihoods. “The lot of us — these old lychee trees — have been forgotten! Nobody comes to pick us, nobody tends us.” Beneath a three-hundred-year-old lychee tree at the foot of Guanyin Mountain, in its vast shade, the old villagers told us.

Looking up into the canopy of an ancient lychee tree, I always wonder how mysterious and abundant the world up there must be. Perhaps Guo Rui cannot forget such scenes either. Once, he spoke of an ancient lychee tree near the village primary school. After lessons let out, he and his friends would climb up into it and play hide-and-seek among the branches. That tree was the one he remembered most vividly. In time, it was felled to make way for a road through the village; fewer and fewer people can still climb trees, and his old friends have scattered to the four winds. “The flavour of lychees is still here,” he said, smiling, then went on to lay out his own ranking of lychee flavours. He feels that even between southern cities not far apart, lychee flavour shifts with the subtlest differences in climate — flavour, like a person, may wander and migrate to other places. After all, both trees and people must drive their roots deep into the soil.

VI. Back in the City

On the day of leaving Yinlin, the sunshine was just right, and the air still carried the earthiness of soil and the sweetness of overripe guavas. We set out early that morning and saw Guo Rui pruning branches; villagers passed along the road with baskets balanced on their shoulders, cradling vegetables freshly picked from the fields. I recalled those midday kitchens again — standing before a pile of unfamiliar vegetables, racking my brains to imagine how they would look on the table, the air thick with the scent of earth, leaves, and hot oil. It struck me then that these days in the village had quietly changed the way I see food. Food is not a point-to-point supply line, but a circulation — from the land to the palm, and back to the land.

I began to learn to read vegetables and soil: on which patch of soil the plantain (Plantago) grows lush and soft, on which species the skin thickens under the heat. I also came to understand, little by little, that sharing meals at Yinlin meant more than simply eating together — it was a relationship of mutual care: we take in what the land gives, and we must tend to the land’s weariness.

Later, on some afternoon back in the city, I drifted aimlessly through the air-conditioned supermarket. The moment I picked up a tomato of flawless shape, a familiar daze stole over me — what manner of land does this tomato come from? Did it, too, once sway in wind and rain, ripening to the chorus of insects? And what did its seed look like?

The supermarket labels offered no answer. I stood before the self-checkout machine, scanning this tomato. The price glowing on the electronic screen was still, after all, only its exchange value as a commodity. Yet the vast life story erased behind it — the warmth of the soil, the turning of the seasons, the tender bond between people and land — cannot be measured by any number.

Author, Foodthink

 Jianing

A practitioner of words and images. Long concerned with the interweaving of climate, body, and perception, exploring the mutual becoming of people and their environment through writing, sound, and fieldwork. Recent writing focuses on land-based knowledge and the micro-experiences of everyday ecology — a desire to draw closer to more farms, and to understand the land.

 

 

 

Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme

The Lianhe Programme “Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme” was launched by Foodthink in 2021 to support young people aspiring to work in ecological agriculture and established ecological farms alike — enabling young people to acquire farming knowledge and skills through hands-on practice, while also documenting and passing on the experience of veteran farmers. The programme channels high-calibre talent to the farms and injects vitality into rural communities.

To date, four rounds of recruitment have been completed, supporting over 80 fellow participants to intern at more than a dozen ecological farms across the country, for periods ranging from three months to one year.

All images in this article were taken by the author

Edited by: Zheng Yuyang