To Farm the Land, He Opened a Noodle Factory
Three months ago, a returned-young couple farming in Gansu welcomed a baby girl, naming her Maizi — “Wheat”. Mother Shitou posted on WeChat Moments: “I hope that little Yin Maizi, born from Shitou’s fields, will grow as tenaciously as our gravel-covered Hongguangtou wheat — walking the path of life with firm, steady steps, loving herself and reaching out to others, clear-minded and good-hearted, grateful for life, experiencing it to the fullest. May Shitou, Maizi, and Huahua accompany one another along this path of life, growing together, until we become the great path of life that is truly our own.”
Before this little “Wheat” came into the world, her father Huahua and mother Shitou had already been farming in their home village in Gansu for nearly ten years and had founded a noodle brand, “Yanguiqing“, specialising in the traditional northwestern “Hongguangtou” wheat variety — and, unusually among returned young farmers, had “established” their own noodle-processing factory.
But in truth, what Huahua wanted most was to farm the land himself, especially to grow chickpeas. As a child, he lived up in the hills of Wuwei, and back then chickpeas grew along every field edge and ditch bank. Fried and eaten straight away, they were wonderfully fragrant.
In the 1990s, the government’s “settlement consolidation” policy brought his family down from the hills to a village near the Yellow River irrigation canal (an irrigation waterway drawn from the Yellow River), and chickpeas were no longer grown. But that memory stayed with him and became the very drive behind his return to the land.
Once he had actually made the return, the endless small tasks — leasing land, choosing a site, overseeing the growing, setting up the factory, recruiting workers, handling sales, livestreaming — left Huahua too busy to tend the chickpea fields with the care they needed.
Flour processing guaranteed profit; farming guaranteed a loss. Faced with the arithmetic of real income and outgoings, payment terms, and risk, how could one hold on to the original commitment to ecological farming? Huahua and Shitou’s answer was a hard one: you have to survive first.
I. Sharing the Risk
But in 2016, once home again, he became a “middleman” instead — through the Yanguiqing cooperative platform he partners with farmers to buy up a distinctive old variety: gravel-covered Hongguangtou wheat. This is a local variety grown across the Hexi Corridor on rain-fed land strewn with Gobi gravel; it yields little, but its wheat aroma is rich and its texture chewy — ideal for flour and noodles. For a returned young farmer in his twenties with no savings, leasing land costs far more than processing, so playing middleman is the safer path to entrepreneurship.
This was not Huahua’s original intention. He had wanted to lease farmers’ land and work it himself. But after three consecutive seasons, the twenty-odd mu he found in his own village all yielded poorly. Under a desert climate where everything depends on rainfall and transpiration is fierce, Hongguangtou wheat yields depend almost entirely on how much rain falls — at the lowest under 100 jin per mu, at most around 400 jin, not a fraction of conventional yields. So farming families have gradually moved towards scale, and smallholders tilling a few dozen mu are now a rare sight.
In 2017–2018, Huahua saw his business partner leave and started over alone. Earlier coverage had dubbed his entrepreneurial journey “defeat after defeat”. Happily, in 2018 he met Shitou, a young woman from Shaanxi — a steady, down-to-earth girl who lives up to her name (Shitou, “Stone”), and who laughs that she was “lured in” by the fragrance of Hongguangtou flour.
Also in 2018, Huahua found a new partner — Uncle Su, a large-scale grain grower in Jingtai City’s Sitan Township, 80 kilometres from Gulang County. Sitan is also suitable for growing Hongguangtou wheat, and the gravel land Uncle Su opened up on his own approaches 1,000 mu. With his help and management, Huahua has reached agreements with growers across 2,000 mu in Sitan Township to buy their wheat.
Shitou says that with the sluggish economy in recent years, Hongguangtou wheat at 2 yuan per jin — twice the price of ordinary wheat — has not sold well locally, and farmers’ barns cannot accommodate years of surplus grain. All of this has made Huahua’s “large-scale” buying easier — their purchase price is a few jiao higher per jin, sometimes reaching 2.6 or 2.7 yuan.
In a sense, Huahua’s ability to work with farming friends and receive wheat grown to ecological standards is itself an “arithmetic problem” in line with economic logic. When drought caps yields, the extra output fertiliser can deliver is almost negligible. In recent years, average Hongguangtou yields in Sitan Township have barely exceeded 100 jin per mu. Even the habit of applying 3–5 jin of fertiliser per mu can be abandoned when the sums simply do not work.
More importantly, on newly prepared gravel land, herbicides simply have no use — before the stones were laid, the land was barren wasteland, exposed to wind and sun, with few weed seeds, and for the first ten years almost no weeds grew.
Huahua acknowledges that buying through cooperation shifts part of the risk onto the farming families: whether there is a total crop failure or the flour cannot be sold, Yanguiqing does not have to bear the loss. Huahua also settles each batch’s payment to farmers only when he buys the next new batch, keeping cash flow comfortable. Yet this is still a win-win born of necessity — as an outsider, if Huahua leased land himself, rents would be higher, and he would bear far greater risk than the farmers ever could.
Uncle Su was also better placed than Huahua to “oversee” the partner farmers — as the local “king of farm machinery”, he controlled the means of production and could identify at source which villagers would need to rent equipment for spraying pesticides.
But flavour alone could not translate into income for the villagers of Sitan Township. With government funding, the township had built a reservoir and hoped to install drip irrigation systems and develop high-standard farmland. Once the constraint of drought was lifted, farmers might rush to grow conventional melons and fruits on sandy land for higher profits. Ecology and livelihood were hard to reconcile, and the partnership with Huahua was by no means guaranteed to last.
Fortunately, the laying of village water pipes was shelved once again. Huahua had not yet looked for new partner farmers; instead, he planned to find some land in a village near the noodle factory and run another “trial” — growing Hongguangtou directly, without laying gravel.
II. Entering the Secondary Sector
The real way to make money from buying wheat is to process it well and sell it.
But at first, noodle processing too ran at a loss. At the contract manufacturer, once the production line started, it churned out large quantities of noodles; if they sold slowly, the only option was to leave them sitting in the warehouse waiting to go “rancid”, and the waste was high.
Flour processing was also a cost. At its peak it ran at 800 yuan per tonne, but by 2023 it had fallen to 300 yuan per tonne.
In 2023, an opportunity arose: a village collective noodle factory in Zhitang Town, Wuwei, was poorly run and put up for lease. The small factory had all its production licences and permits in order and ample floor space, so Huahua and Shitou decisively took it over.
Owning “their own” noodle factory gave Yanguiqing, for the first time, a firm grip on production. Three or four full-time employees stood ready, processing and packing several flavours of noodles. Trying out new flavours became easier, and they could also process on behalf of fellow farmers, earning a processing fee. Now they ran the line almost every day, processing 300–400 jin a day and consuming around 100 tonnes of flour over the course of a year.
If sales pick up, greater output is within reach — the 4,000 mu of new gravel-covered land in Uncle Su’s village could together supply more than 400 tonnes of flour, four times their current annual consumption.
But the two of them simply cannot cope. Yanguiqing had wanted to hire a full-time employee to help manage the factory since 2024, and by 2025 they also wanted someone to handle livestreaming — selling via livestream had caught on in the ecological-farming community too. In the first half of the year, Shitou had been livestreaming herself pulling noodles in the gravel-covered fields, which was rather effective, but in the second half, with the baby due and orders piling up, the little family grew even busier and the livestreams were paused again.
III. Rain Drenches the “Chickpea Dream”
But when the dream meets reality — chickpeas frequently suffer total crop failure. For four years he has been losing money on this land and has had to shrink his operation to just 200 mu in one of the two villages.
“So many more weeds again!” Stepping over the fence into the field, those are the first words out of his mouth. It takes an hour and a half by car to get here from home; he is stretched so thin that he cannot come often.
In Gansu, where irrigation is scarce and farmland is predominantly dryland, Huahua once considered it a blessing to have found such a precious plot with natural rainfall — at just 100 yuan a mu.
But he had not expected so much rain. Pull the weeds and they grow straight back; they have become his biggest cost.
Last June, to clear the weeds on 100 mu, he hired labourers for a full month. At the peak, he had sixty people a day; at 500 yuan a mu, the total bill came to nearly 50,000 yuan.
This year he changed how he hires. He drives his new-energy vehicle into the village to collect day labourers — 120 yuan per person per day. His vehicle only fits four, so he hires a second one: eight workers, two vehicles, at 160 yuan a head, vehicle included. It is the busy farming season; Huahua gets up before five to drive the workers out to the fields and returns them to the village by seven. By the time he gets home, it is past eight.
This year’s rainfall is even heavier. Weeding once is no longer enough, but if he weeds a second time, “even if chickpeas sold for 50 yuan a jin, it would still be a loss.”
Also this year, for the first time, he heard that the Tibetan farmers here have begun using herbicides.
It is not only the weeds. When the rain is too abundant, this cold-hardy, dry-loving legume begins to go “leggy” — putting on stems and leaves but setting no seed. Squeeze a chickpea pod in the field and you find it hollow inside. August is supposed to be the critical growing period for chickpeas.
Huahua says that if the skies clear now, those hollow pods might still fill out a little; but if the rain keeps coming, there will hardly be a harvest this year — after the National Day holiday, first snow will fall over Tian zhu, and the growing season will be over.
Last August, it rained for an entire month straight in Tian zhu. By September, the rain still would not stop, and the black soil remained muddy and sticky underfoot two or three days later, hampering the harvest. The chickpeas developed small black speckles of mould and looked unappealing. Even after Huahua and Shitou sorted them twice — once by machine, once by hand — and flagged the issue specifically on their sales platform, some customers still requested returns after receiving their order.
This August, the very afternoon we were walking through the fields in Tian zhu, before three o’clock the sky darkened again. Not long after we got in the car, raindrops the size of beans pelted the windows.
So long as he does not lose too badly, Huahua still does not want to give up this scenic private plot — the kind of place one might dream of retiring to. He is considering laying mulch film over the chickpea fields next year to smother the rampant weeds. That would mean even higher labour costs. Originally, Huahua and Shitou drove their own tractor and seeder and needed only a few dozen yuan a mu for seed and fuel.
“I am pouring a fortune into this place just to enjoy life,” he says.
IV. The Gamble of Farming
Chickpeas command a high unit price and enjoy strong market recognition, and Huahua can also source traditional local varieties from relatives’ plots and individual sellers at farmers’ markets. Barring extreme weather, they are certainly well worth going all in on.
He has also increased his linseed acreage, as linseed is hardier against drought and waterlogging and gives a more reliable harvest — this year, even before the crop was harvested, a single ecological processor had bought up his entire linseed crop. Still, once the costs of transport, oil pressing, packaging and sales are factored in, the purchase price may not be all that high. People in Gansu and Qinghai grow linseed too, and the competition on the supply side is not trivial. Huahua does not dare to expand production too aggressively.
One year, encouraged by the county government, Huahua also tried growing Goji berries. This crop is delicate and labour-intensive, yet even on the conventional market it can fetch 10–20 yuan a jin, promising handsome returns.
But what he had not bargained for was that the seedlings supplied to farmers turned out to be defective, and the Goji berry crop was “wiped out entirely”. Across 200 mu, Huahua lost several hundred thousand yuan, and someone in the neighbouring village lost over two million — that farmer sprayed pesticide once a week and had dozens of people weeding in the fields every day. In the end, the head of the Forestry and Fruit Bureau was taken away, and the promised government subsidy of 200 yuan per mu was never delivered. If anything, Huahua was relieved that he had managed his land so sparingly and had not sunk too much money in.
In this sense, farming is not merely an arithmetic problem — it is also a gamble. Beyond natural disasters and the farming calendar, shifts in purchase prices and defects in seedlings and seed seem to leave farmers powerless to fight back.
Another village where Huahua had a partnership in Tian zhu was once ordered by the government to grow broad beans. Broad beans need processing before they can be sold, and demand within the ecological-farming community is small, so Huahua had initially been reluctant. But as it happened, the market price of broad beans was high that year, fetching five or six yuan a jin. Huahua sold his crop on the conventional market and earned over twenty thousand yuan — which went entirely to offsetting the losses on other crops that year.
In the minds of Gansu farmers, the unpredictability of prices is most starkly illustrated by the onion: each mu of onion land demands an investment of several thousand yuan, and the yield per mu approaches ten thousand jin. When the purchase price reaches fifty to sixty fen a jin, a single mu can bring in one to two thousand yuan in profit.
But there are also times when no buyer shows up or prices plunge: once the purchase price drops below twenty fen, a bumper harvest becomes a year of ruin. On short-video apps, farmers in Gansu and Henan regularly share clips of onions rotting in the fields. “But surely you look at how well they do when the price is up!” Huahua also pointed out.
Growing onions, then, is like gambling. In truth, the fate of most crops is much the same.
And so some farmers have concluded that, with so many uncontrollable variables in play, rather than gambling against the market, they would rather leave their fate to Heaven.
At Huahua’s base in Tian zhu, he grows chickpeas and linseed, and practises crop rotation with potatoes and buckwheat. We noticed that beneath a thick, luxuriant stand of buckwheat, a layer of potato seedlings lay “hidden”. This had been a potato plot where mulch film was laid down and the seed sown with care this year. But the buckwheat that had lodged the previous year had scattered seeds all across the ground, and these had upstaged the planted potatoes — now the self-sown buckwheat, growing wild and rampant, was outstripping the hand-sown potato shoots.
“Maybe we should just harvest the buckwheat instead?” we asked.
“That’s what I’m thinking too,” Huahua replied.
“And there’s a ‘new harvest’ again,” he sighed, whether tinged with bitterness or optimism, it was hard to tell.
V. A Big Man of the Northwest Finds His Place
He described to us the most common wild animal on the northwestern grasslands — the marmot — “You know, the one in all those reaction memes going ‘aahh, aahh’!” — and he nearly acted out the marmot’s shape and expression himself.
Then there was the hog badger that had just wandered into the chicken coop — a wild animal rarely seen locally. “A chicken dangling from its mouth, belly soft and round — just like mine. And it just sauntered right past, not a shred of respect for me!”
His family recalled that Huahua was clever, but after attending a private high school with a poor reputation, he lost all interest in studying and simply ran off to work in Xinjiang. He eventually gained admission to a second-tier university, then took a leave of absence to take part in programmes in rural reconstruction and community-supported agriculture. Back in 2018, his WeChat account would repost articles discussing the ecological issues of gravel-covered farming; even now, he remains steadfast in his commitment to growing without pesticides and without fertiliser as the fundamental principles of his farming.
Huahua admits that he used to act on impulse and muddle through without much thought. When he returned to the village in 2016, he once kept five or six dogs and described himself as a sort of “ringleader”: every time he stepped out, the pack trailed behind him in grand procession — “what a commanding sight.”
He loves to wander and explore. Spot a turning he has never taken and he cannot resist following it all the way to the end, just to see what is there. Nearly every village and town near home has been “mapped out” to the last detail by his own feet.
But now that he has turned forty, he genuinely wants to “settle down” — to prove to his family that ecological farming is a dependable, promising “proper job”. He “disbanded” the dog pack, keeping just two to guard the noodle factory.
Shitou has taken over the books from Huahua. Every agricultural input, every purchase, must be recorded in detail. Huahua’s “grand” new ideas (even while we were visiting, he was in talks with a local premium-vinegar producer about noodle vinegar processing) do not always get “approved”. Sometimes he feels like sneaking in a bit more planting behind Shitou’s back, but more often he simply reflects that having a good wife is what gives him peace of mind.
In the early hours of 22 September, Shitou safely delivered a baby boy — mother and child both well. The family now has more expenses to meet. After the National Day holiday, Huahua will have to go harvest the chickpeas in Tian zhu himself.
Unless otherwise noted, all images in this article were taken by the author.
Editor: Tianle