On the Land: From Unease and Guilt to a Clear Conscience | Grandma Kouzi

I. A Thousand Ideals Are Worth Less Than One Act

Not a single cent in pay – braving the freezing cold with gear of his own – the least I could do was make sure he ate well. I bought a mountain of steamed buns, fried cakes, tea eggs, soy milk, fried dough sticks, millet porridge – all cheap and good. Gaotian picked through the plastic bags and disposable cutlery and did the sums: “This one breakfast of ours produced twelve pieces of plastic waste.”

I had always paid attention to how environmental change affects the Earth and human survival – desertification, sandstorms, penguin habitat, even the niche issue of the Jinsha River hydropower projects’ environmental impact. I had even filmed a documentary about it. By any measure, I considered myself fairly environmentally conscious. But that morning, I felt deeply ashamed and sorry and mortified – not towards Gaotian, but towards this world, towards the Earth.

On paper, we all know we should be green, but we live in this world – we need to dress and feed ourselves, taking from the world is unavoidable. Modern life is intensely socialised and commercialised; the further a person’s basic needs sit from where they are produced, the longer the supply chain, the greater the damage to the environment. I am grateful to Gaotian for waking me up on that cold morning. From then on, “being green” stopped being a principle or an ideal. I declared war on disposable cutlery and plastic bags: I carried my own cup, my own cutlery, my own shopping bag everywhere.

In 2009, in Xiangfan, Hubei, Yun Jianli, founder of the Green Han River movement, spoke movingly about the damage caused by phosphorus-containing detergents and offered a concrete, workable alternative – use soap and soap powder instead of hand wash, washing powder, and liquid detergent. I put it into practice immediately. It grew from there: I stopped using shower gel and shampoo as well. Not only does it lighten the burden on the environment, it eases the burden on the body – my hair stayed clean and flake-free, and I saved money to boot.

In 2018, deep in Lishan in Taiwan’s Central Mountain Range, I experienced the mountain-view lavatory belonging to Abao (Li Baolian, who went into the mountains in 1999 to become a fruit farmer and is among Taiwan’s earliest ecological farmers) – but I could not find any toilet paper. Desperate, I asked for a paperless solution. She cupped her hands, scooped up a handful of water, and asked me: “Toilet paper – is it hygienic?” From that moment on, no more toilet paper.

Among any three, one can be my teacher. I am grateful to every one of them.

II. The Apology of Being Human

Taiwan’s organic agriculture got off the ground early. At the time, organic grain covered about 1% of arable land (online sources note that in 2022, organic farmland in China accounted for 0.8% of total agricultural land, with grain making up 47.5% of that, or 0.36%) – but in Shengou, over half the land was organic, and there were more than two hundred organic farmers at the time.

The village had a farmers’ canteen, Meihong’s Kitchen, a little book-and-vegetable shop, and other shared spaces, where you could find the finest produce in the whole of Taiwan. Many farmers practised half-farming-half-X. Some of those “X”s were jobs in the city or remote work; more often they were food- and farming-related crafts or processing. They grew almost everything, made almost everything, and enjoyed a reputation across the island for quality food at fair prices. There was also plenty of bartering among the village farmers. As a rice farmer who also served as the village brewer and taught food courses, my fine wines and cooking were hugely popular, which meant I could trade for even better things – effortlessly achieving the highest quality of daily life within the lowest-carbon journey.

In Shengou, I lived two years of extraordinary abundance. If it hadn’t been for the drainage pipes running out to the rice paddies, that vivid, colourful time would have been all but perfect.

Rural Taiwan had the same piped water and electricity as the cities, but no municipal sewerage system. Wastewater from the village was channelled left and right into the river, and plots nearest the outflow rented for less.

The farmhouse I rented sat some distance from the village street. A handful of houses were scattered among the fields, and household wastewater ran straight into the rice paddies. At first I hadn’t noticed the problem, until a fellow farmer took me to look at the water in the field.

I was born and raised in a city. People who live within a modern water and drainage system never see sewage. I had no idea where my laundry and dishwater ended up, or what harm it caused. But that day, I saw with my own eyes that the water from my drainpipe was a different colour from the paddy water, and the young rice shoots nearest the outflow were visibly yellower, thinner.

I didn’t eat meat, and by then I rarely stir-fried – kitchen grease should have been minimal. I strictly refused disposable cutlery, reused plastic items, and shunned phosphorus-containing detergents. Even among the organic farmers of Shengou, few went that far. And yet the water I sent out was still harming the paddies.

I felt deeply, deeply, deeply sorry. This apology was not just for my fellow farmers. Being human, I owed the land an apology.

III. Resetting My Relationship with the World

Birds eat insects, insects eat grass; when a bird dies it falls to the ground, is eaten by insects, and rots in the soil to feed the grass. Birds also eat earthworms; earthworms eat the soil, loosen it as they go, and fertilise the grass with their own excretion… Every one of these creatures is part of the ecosystem. Animals, plants – each a link in the cycle. But humans are the exception. Grass feeds sheep, sheep dung feeds back to the grass; wolves eat sheep and other grazing animals; when a wolf dies, it returns its body to the earth. But humans are the exception. Humans eat everything, lord over the world, take and demand as they please, not only eating many animals to extinction but also swallowing up the land itself.

The cities we build grow ever larger; steel and concrete seal the earth. Urban sprawl devours the soil that nurtures life, creating what Hong Kong people call the “concrete forest”. Wherever the human footprint falls, the vitality of the land retreats, step by step.

Carrying the guilt of being human, I planned my home at Erren Valley to do as little damage to the land as possible. Nothing was hardened unless it absolutely had to be – and “hardening” here doesn’t just mean concrete; it includes soil compacted under footfall. Concrete went down only when truly, truly necessary. Erren Valley No. 1 raises the house on a pig-dung net, with concrete only at the pile feet. Later, Erren Valley No. 2 achieved every living function on just ten square metres of hardened ground.

The drainage ditches at the Yilan farmhouse left a vast psychological shadow on me. At Erren Valley, household wastewater passes through Banana Circle No. 1, then Banana Circle No. 2, into the water lily pond, and from there into the vegetable garden as irrigation water. The young man next door gave me a bucket of red carp fry. I was worried sick – terrified I would poison them. Years on, the fish are thriving in the water lily pond, and there are new fry too.

The first line of defence in purifying the wastewater is the banana plant – lush, broad-leafed, and this year I should be able to eat the bananas. After two stages of filtration, the mulberry trees and wild ginger lilies along the water lily pond’s edge are growing beautifully. I am grateful to these living things: I give them my wastewater, and they give me back jade stalks and jewelled blooms.

The pig-dung net is an absolute stroke of genius in country building. I process my harvests here; it is Erren Valley’s main working space, having absorbed the shells of over two hundred jin of peanuts, the pods of more than a hundred jin of assorted beans, and countless vegetable leaves, fruit stones, walnut shells, and what have you. You never need to sweep a thing – an absolute boon for the lazy.

IV. The Harem of “Weed Community Composition”

Fujian and Taiwan share a similar climate – warm and rain-soaked, a paradise for grasses. To a vegetable grower, weeds are a nightmare – the kind that threaten the very life of your crops. Xingyan sorts the weeds in his plot into noxious and non-noxious. Noxious weeds are tall and robust: their height commandeers the sunlight, their vigour seizes the nutrients – and among them, the ones that spread by nodes and by roots are the Miejue Shitai of noxious weeds, leaving vegetables with no way to live. To deal with noxious weeds, you must pull them before they flower and set seed, pile them in a designated area, cover them to exclude light, and let the compost ferment to kill off pathogens and weed seeds, turning it all into quality seedling soil with a suitable carbon-to-nitrogen ratio.

After two years of practice, the vegetable plot of over a hundred square metres looked markedly different from the land right beside it. The vegetables were plump and vigorous, no noxious weeds in sight, and almost no bare soil either – the ground was carpeted mostly with low, shallow-rooted grasses that neither stole the sunlight nor competed for much nutrition, yet held the soil against erosion, cut down evaporation, and fed the land humus. “A sound weed community composition has been tentatively established.”

I had long despaired of the relationship between people and the land – humans seize from the land, ravage the land – but Xingyan’s vegetable plot showed me that a healthy dialogue between people and the land is possible: in asking the land for food, we can also give back, nourish the land.

Erren Valley is, in some ways, an enlarged version of Xingyan’s approach. I honour him through my own practice.

Leaving land completely wild is, in fact, drawing down the soil’s strength. Erren Valley had sat overgrown and unmanaged; once the excavator cleared the tangle, we found the soil barren and severely compacted. Turning it to plant crops was simply impossible – not only was the earth hardened, the entire tangled mass beneath was cogon grass (Imperata cylindrica) roots. I had to call the excavator back to dig three chi deep. Cogon grass has extraordinary vitality – leave even a scrap of root in the ground and it sprouts again, endlessly. I then brought in a dozen or so women to break up the clods and pull out the roots, working for a full week. The extracted roots piled into a mountain. Doing the sums – machine work plus manual labour – the cogon grass roots cost over ten thousand yuan.

And even then, it wasn’t over. My war with cogon grass lasted three years. I assembled my own eighteen weapons of war – every tool for rooting out grass. The moment I spotted a single shoot, I flew into a frenzy, digging it out root and all, baking it in the scorching sun until it died. Now, if I want to photograph the evidence, I can barely find a trace.

After more than four years of life-and-death grappling with noxious weeds, the weed community composition at Erren Valley has changed out of all recognition. The more human activity an area sees, the richer its weed community. The best is under the pig-dung net, then the ground in front of and behind the house. I rarely used to cross the ditch to the hillside behind the house. I had planted chestnut, oil tea camellia, and Furong plums as the main trees, but as seedlings they had no advantage, and the weeds grew wildly. This year I built a new pavilion spanning the water, and the weed-choked path leading to it became my harem – how could I allow a noxious weed to take its ease at my bedside? Active weeding comes after every good soaking rain, when the soil is soft enough to pull by the root. Reactive weeding comes after the grasses flower – whatever the situation, you cannot slack off. Even if the ground is too hard to dig, at least slash the tops off with a sickle. But the cuttings cannot be carelessly discarded either – immature seeds will still rise again with the spring wind – so they must go into the river, to make a clean end of it.

Now, virtually no noxious weeds are seen growing tall. The dominant plants are Coreopsis (tickseed) and roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa). Coreopsis has explosive vitality – by next year it will surely blanket the entire path. Roselle is not only beautiful and edible; its fleshy leaves and stout stems make the best material for correcting soil acidity. With humans, Coreopsis, and roselle forging a powerful alliance, total suppression of noxious weeds is only a year away. My harem will be a golden carpet studded with roselle.

Wild animals assert their sovereignty across the open country with their own excretion, marking out the territory on which their survival depends. How much land does one person need to live? I have tried it – a small patch of land is enough for total self-sufficiency, with a surplus left over to send to my son. I get my healthy life, and the birds nearby enjoy a better quality of living too. The food forest gives us food while fixing nitrogen, protecting the soil, and nourishing the land – N gains in one go.

Four years on, surveying my territory, I was startled to discover that the area with the most obvious improvement in soil quality was, of all things, a “waste-coverage circle.”

Years ago I wrote about Erren Valley’s urine-separating dry toilet and returning human waste to the field as fertiliser. Erren Valley’s dry toilet has been upgraded time and again; it is now a garden lavatory with lilies at hand, red spider lilies (Lycoris radiata) in the middle distance, and pumpkin blossoms beyond – an essential part of the daily life I carry out freely behind closed doors. Every so often I take the collected urine, dilute it with water, and use it to water the vegetables; for the solid waste, I compost, dig a pit, and bury it to transform slowly. The compost bin is heavy and won’t travel far – all the burial sites sit within about ten metres. Even if they were a little closer, there really is no smell; it is purely a psychological unease. The plants around the burial sites show a visible growth advantage. At last I understand why the old farmers said, “Fertile water never feeds a stranger’s field.”

Pulling noxious weeds is a daily routine, but the only area I can truly cover without missing a spot is the roughly ten-metre radius around the house. I pass back and forth and pluck out whatever I catch sight of – which happens to be my fruit and vegetable plot, which coincidentally is also that “waste-coverage circle.” I cannot help laughing: at last I have become part of the land. As the fruit-picker perched at the apex of the food-forest pyramid, the life the land nourishes is itself an animal that belongs to the land. The evidence is plain: human activity does not necessarily harm the environment. A human life can exist in symbiosis with the living systems around it – thriving together, growing together.

The land nourishes life; I make the land fertile. At last I can stand on it with a clear conscience.

I tend them a beautiful weed community, and they return me wholesome food. My land and I are inseparable, not for a single moment.

 

Foodthink contributor

Kouzi

A tenacious farmer and the village brewer. Full-time foodie, part-time farmer, amateur writer.