Do We Control the Vegetables, or Do the Vegetables Control Us? A Life Dominated by Greenhouse Vegetables

Foodthink Speaks

During the targeted poverty alleviation campaign, to rapidly drive farmers towards prosperity, the government of Gong County (pseudonym) introduced greenhouse vegetables with superior market returns and adopted subsidy policies, seeking to embed them into the livelihood systems of local farmers. With the government providing greenhouses, seedlings, and technical guidance free of charge, what causes local farming households to take a passive attitude towards greenhouse vegetables, and why do they still favour white lotus despite its relatively lower returns?

Yesterday’s article “Why Are Smallholder Farmers Unwilling to Grow Greenhouse Vegetables?” by Sang Kun examined the comprehensive demands that greenhouse vegetable cultivation places on capital, technology, and labour. This article focuses on the ecological and social impacts of growing greenhouse vegetables under intensive factor inputs, and on reflections regarding industry development.

● The greenhouses built with great fanfare in Gong County during the poverty eradication campaign are now largely idle. In 2022, Chen Village in Gong County even repurposed over 700 mu of idle greenhouses for raising rice seedlings.

I. Monoculture Planting

Greenhouse vegetables demand high investment and carry steep costs for trial and error, so most producers simply “follow the crowd”—opting to scale up monoculture planting of the most popular produce on the market. This inevitably increases the risk of pest and disease outbreaks. The market’s standardised demands for taste, quality, and appearance further intensify the use of pesticides and other harmful chemicals.

In a well-planned greenhouse layout, a certain distance should be left between greenhouses, yet Gong County’s vegetable greenhouses are densely packed on the limited flat land, which hinders growers’ overall development. Since “every person has a different temperament and habits”, growers have varying crop arrangements and succession plans, and the dense concentration of monoculture planting easily leads to cross-contamination between crop successions.

● Crop succession (chakou) refers to the seasonal crops grown on a plot in sequence and the order in which they are replaced. The preceding crop is called the “previous crop”, and the following crop the “subsequent crop”. Growers must understand the succession characteristics of each crop in order to plan crop rotation properly. The image shows vegetable greenhouses during a succession change.

For example, Chen Keli and Chen Chengren in Chen Village both grow tomatoes, their greenhouses side by side. In June 2020, Chen Keli found tomato prices too low, and with his crops falling ill one after another, he used a machine to tear out every last tomato. Chen Chengren’s tomatoes, which had been treated preventively in advance, had shown no signs of disease. But once Chen Keli pulled out his crop, the pests in his greenhouse migrated into Chen Chengren’s, leaving him no choice but to spray again.

Furthermore, some companies use biopesticides and can easily drive pests away, yet neighbouring smallholder growers who cannot afford the costlier biopesticides find those displaced pests invading their own greenhouses, and are then forced to increase their spraying.

In fact, local farmers’ experience tells them that “if only a few people are growing a large plot together, pests and diseases can be kept in check.” Moreover, traditional crop rotation and intercropping can effectively control pests and diseases by exploiting the synergistic and antagonistic relationships between crops—for instance, the traditional tobacco–lotus–rice rotation effectively prevents diseases of common origin, and planting a few yardlong beans in a greenhouse can help monitor and control powdery mildew. But in densely concentrated monoculture greenhouses, as planting layouts and crop structures shift, the old agricultural knowledge no longer holds sway.

II. “The More You Plant, the More Disease You Grow”

Beyond cross-infection, continuous high-intensity cultivation has also introduced new pests and diseases and soil contamination. While my team and I were doing fieldwork in Chen Village, local farmers widely reported that after four years of growing greenhouse vegetables, they had encountered pests and diseases never previously seen in the area.

“On our land, a lot of diseases have appeared that even our elders don’t recognise. They affect not just vegetables but white lotus, rice, and tobacco leaves too. … I think it’s because we’ve been growing greenhouse vegetables so intensively these past few years, planting non-stop all year round. Cross-contamination between crop successions and the depletion of certain trace elements in the soil give rise to new diseases—some of which no amount of spraying can fix. The more you plant, the more diseases you grow; the more you plant, the more insects you get.”

The relentless, frequent chemical spraying that goes with such intensive cultivation has had an even more direct impact on producers’ health. Lin Fuhui, a company manager in Chen Village, said: “The temperature here stays high all year round, and it’s even hotter inside the greenhouses. The workers are too old—most of them have high blood pressure, and the frailer ones simply can’t cope. They say that breathing in too much chemical fertiliser and pesticide fumes makes them dizzy.”

● A farmer inside a greenhouse preparing to spray, with a freshly mixed batch of pesticide beside him.

Moreover, some farmers feel that today’s organic fertiliser is nothing like it used to be. “In the past, the farmyard manure we used didn’t contain so much salt and hormones. But now, even if you go to the market to buy granules made from composted chicken or pig manure, once they’ve been diluted with water there is still a large amount of salt in them. Those salts are very hard to absorb away just by switching crops between seasons.”

Clearly, greenhouse vegetables, though they offer a certain economic return, are rather like opening Pandora’s box: that economic gain does not necessarily translate into equivalent social or ecological benefits. Instead, it brings adverse environmental impacts to the local community, and in the long run is detrimental to sustainable land use and impedes the green development of China’s agriculture.

III. An Uncertain Market

In truth, the challenges outlined above are not insurmountable for capable farmers willing to invest the time and effort. After all, a return of ¥20,000–30,000 per mu of greenhouse vegetables per year is still worth a gamble.

But Gong County’s greenhouse vegetable industry faces another major predicament: the market.

Market volatility has caused growers to suffer losses on several occasions in Gong County. Crop succession timing is the growers’ only window to capture the market. The usual strategy is to anticipate when a particular vegetable variety is about to run short or has yet to hit the market in volume, and to time the raising of seedlings, transplanting, and harvesting to seize that succession window.

Yet vegetable prices shift almost by the minute—on any given day, the same variety can fetch a different price at a different hour. When a single cash crop is promoted on a large scale and market prices crash, even the companies recruited by the government are not immune to losing every last yuan they invested.

To broaden sales channels and reduce market risk, the Gong County government has tried positioning its vegetable industry as a “vegetable basket” base for the Guangdong-Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area, aiming to connect with consumer markets in Hong Kong, Macao, and major mainland cities. But only a handful of the large vegetable companies courted through investment attraction can actually meet the vegetable supply access standards for Hong Kong and Macao.

Initially, many farmers pinned their hopes on these companies, expecting them to help sell their produce. But due to gaps in field management, cultivation techniques, and the quality of seedlings and agricultural inputs, the vegetables grown by smallholders fall short of Greater Bay Area market-entry standards. Even when companies sell on their behalf as part of government support programmes, the instability in quality control remains unresolved. Smallholders who cannot ride the wave into Hong Kong and Macao markets must find their own buyers.

For smallholder farmers, one potential outlet is bulk orders from work units: during the poverty eradication campaign, some township governments mobilised government offices to make internal purchases of farmers’ vegetables under support policies. But as the campaign has concluded, that internal market has vanished, and ordinary farmers without established social connections find it difficult to sustain sales through this channel. As a result, most greenhouse vegetable growers in Gong County have shifted to local retail and wholesale markets.

● Farmers can of course command higher prices selling at local markets, but volumes are low and the labour is costly.

But growers soon discovered that greenhouse vegetables held no clear advantage in the local market.

For example, locals prefer long purple aubergines to the round aubergines favoured in external markets. They crave the sharp heat of facing-heaven chillies and have little appetite for bell peppers or persimmon-shaped sweet peppers. As for xing gourd, sweet potato, and taro—staple ingredients for the meatballs and dumplings made here—these can all be grown outdoors, and every household’s kitchen garden already has a few plants; no greenhouse is needed to create a growing environment.

If growers switch to varieties that suit local tastes, they are largely confined to selling locally, but the limited purchasing power of the local market can sustain only a limited number of growers. Those who entered first may taste some success, while newcomers find it hard to carve out new ground, squeezing margins even thinner.

IV. The Dominated Life

The one advantage greenhouse vegetables offer growers is off-season cultivation. In winter, smallholders who grow open-field vegetables enter the slack agricultural season, and it is precisely then that greenhouse growers hit their true succession window—but this also turns what would have been their “idle season” into their “busy season”.

Zhu Zhanjie, a 38-year-old farmer from Zhu Village, said: “Since I started greenhouse farming, I’m up before dawn and working past dark, spending almost the entire year inside the greenhouse. I can’t look after my own children. Even cooking, getting the kids to and from school, and rushing them to hospital when they’re ill—all of it has to fall on my parents. … There is a bit more money in greenhouse farming, I suppose, but it’s brutally hard. You feel like you’re hardly human. You can’t even tend to your family.”

In theory, because vegetables cannot be replanted on the same ground season after season, and because high-intensity cultivation depletes the soil, vegetable greenhouses should have a fallow period of three to four months each year. But to extract as much profit as possible, companies and growers typically skip the fallow period. If pest and disease pressure inside a greenhouse becomes too severe, they resort to a staggered rotation of fallow periods to keep vegetables coming through.

“Once you take up greenhouse farming, the days simply cannot stop—there is work every single day.” The relentless pace and high density of labour mean that producers are swept along by their crops all year round, and their time for social participation is drastically curtailed.

● A communal gathering at an ancestral hall for members of the same surname.

Gong County is a stronghold of the Hakka people. Given their long history of migration across distant lands, the Hakka place exceptional importance on clan solidarity and participation in communal affairs. Whether it is building a house or holding weddings and funerals, family matters are marked with feasts in the ancestral hall, where clansmen gather to reinforce internal bonds.

Yet the village’s greenhouse vegetable growers frequently find themselves missing such occasions: “What’s the point of earning money if it’s to look after your family? I’m at home running a greenhouse and still can’t tend to the family—it’s no different from being a migrant worker. I can’t take part in anything else either. People say they barely recognise me since I took up greenhouse farming.”

In Gong County’s greenhouse vegetable industry, producers appear to be in the position of controllers, yet in reality they are the ones dominated in market competition, no longer able to govern their own lives.

V. Greenhouse Vegetables as an “institutional crop”

Let us return to the initial question: given promising market prospects and favourable policy support, why are smallholder farmers unwilling to grow greenhouse vegetables?

The example of Gong County’s greenhouse vegetable industry shows that, under capitalised operation, greenhouse vegetables are fast-growing, demand heavy water and fertiliser inputs, require high technical skill, are limited to a narrow range of varieties, are susceptible to pests and diseases, cannot be intercropped or rotated, and have production time almost entirely coextensive with labour time—all of which make the industry one that must possess a degree of organisation, even institutional character.

institutional crop

In analysing religion in Chinese society, C.K. Yang proposed the twin concepts of institutional religion (institutional religion) and diffused religion (diffused religion). This article holds that the institutional and the diffused carry inherent typological and methodological significance and can therefore also be used to examine the intrinsic affinity between crops, industries, and social life.

The institutional character of a crop, as used in this article, refers to the fact that, owing to the deep penetration of the market and capital, the crop’s breeding, sowing, growth, harvesting, and other field-management processes, as well as its subsequent market sales, all take on independent social-institutional attributes; such a crop is thus termed an institutional crop. Once an operator enters into the cultivation of such an institutional crop, their entire life must be arranged around the habits and rhythms of that crop and even the industry itself. In this way, production becomes the subject and life the object—a dynamic that constitutes an important reason why operators seek to escape from the crop and the industry.

The essence of the greenhouse vegetable industry is analogous to the standardised, de-differentiated, and organised institutional production of industry. A greenhouse is, in itself, a miniature processing workshop: capital, in pursuit of maximum profit, constructs a sealed enclosure within a confined space, cutting off natural elements and seeking to break the growing of crops into discrete processing stages, each supplied with the corresponding factors of production to extract economic returns.

In other words, producers must organise labour and deploy technology to control every stage of crop production within the shortest possible time, compress the crop’s growth cycle, and hit the succession market window precisely, or they will stand no chance of profiting from fierce competition.

When the logic of capital is injected into the growth process of a crop, the crop ceases to be a pure and simple agricultural commodity and becomes capitalised—an instrument and vehicle for the expanded reproduction of capital. The greenhouse vegetable industry, tethered to the market system, is like a treadmill: once operators step onto it, they can only be swept forward at its pace, and as soon as they cease investing or slow down even slightly, they risk being flung off to become casualties of competition.

● A greenhouse put to “waste of talent”: intended for high-value fruit vegetables, it was hastily switched to Chinese chives—which could just as easily be grown outdoors—after the operator misjudged the succession timing.

VI. “Diffuse Crops”: White Lotus

If greenhouse vegetables, by virtue of their growth characteristics, are more susceptible to heavy intervention by markets and capital, compelling operators to organise their entire lives around production (an institutional crop), then the white lotus traditionally cultivated in Gong County enables farmers to strike a balance between economic returns and social well-being (a diffuse crop).

Diffuse Crops

The diffuseness of a crop refers to the congruent integration between the crop’s own growth habits, the industrial characteristics that arise from them, and the operating entity that runs the enterprise. In a diffuse crop and its industry, although the crop’s growth cycle and rhythm may bear traces of human technical modification, they remain embedded within the social life of the operator rather than detached from it, merging with the rhythms of the operator’s daily life.

First, Gong County’s geography—characterised by hills and paddy fields—is naturally suited to growing white lotus, without the upfront investment in levelling land and building greenhouses that greenhouse vegetables demand. When cultivated on one’s own land, the cost is just ¥1,200 per mu.

Second, the field management and processing are straightforward: white lotus does not require the complex techniques that greenhouse vegetables demand at the planting, harvesting, or processing stages, allowing the maximum mobilisation of household labour, including children, women, and the elderly. As local farmers often say: “One elderly person can look after five or six mu of white lotus.” During our household surveys, we often found that in a single family, from grandparents in their eighties to children as young as six, everyone takes part in the processing of fresh lotus seeds—shelling, peeling, and removing the bitter core—making each household a veritable white lotus workshop.

Moreover, white lotus has a growth cycle of some 210 days, and since the lotus seed pods, lotus seeds, and lotus roots do not mature at the same time, growers can organise the rhythms of their lives accordingly. And as the saying goes, “the whole white lotus plant is treasure”: the seeds (whether fresh or dried), leaves, flowers, and roots can all be sold, greatly enhancing its economic value.

White lotus affords farmers a flexible social schedule alongside economic returns, while the farmers and their village communities have, on the basis of the crop’s characteristics, built a complex network of brokers and a price-setting system, making white lotus an integral part of their livelihood systems.

Because of these properties, white lotus does not, unlike greenhouse vegetables, turn the tables and become a relatively independent, institutionalised production system; nor does it dominate the farmers’ lives—it simply becomes part of them.

● Dried lotus leaves and processed lotus seeds laid out to dry at a villager’s doorstep.

● A whole family working together to shell lotus seeds.

VII. What Kind of Industrial Revitalisation Does the Countryside Need?

This article does not argue that greenhouses are unsuitable for rural society. Rather, it seeks to emphasise that institutionalised agricultural industries such as greenhouse vegetables, if they are to take root in the countryside, must consider the farmers who are living subjects and their overall way of life, finding the most fitting mode of embedding that leaves farmers room in their production and daily existence.

The sociological perspective on agriculture insists that we must not overlook the social dimensions of crops and industries, still less the interconnections between crops and industries on the one hand and families and even village communities on the other. If economic returns alone are foregrounded—if crops yielding higher profits are deemed to warrant vigorous development as industries and transplanting into new locales—then resistance or rejection from farmers and their rural communities will be inevitable.

In the farmers’ worldview, life and production are indivisible. The revitalisation of rural industries depends on the social fabric of the village and the arrangements of household livelihoods. Only by approaching agriculture, the countryside, and farmers from a holistic perspective in which all three are inseparable and mutually constitutive—by identifying the social mechanisms through which they interlink and work in concert—can the overall benefits of industrial revitalisation be realised.

References:

[1] Xiong Chunwen, Sang Kun. “Crop Structure, Livelihood Systems, and the Effectiveness Mechanisms of Industrial Poverty Alleviation—An Empirical Study of a County in East China.” Yunnan Social Sciences, 2020(03): 75–85.

[2] Sang Kun. “Institutional Crops and Diffuse Crops: The Crop-Characteristic Mechanism Behind Differences in Agricultural Industry Development—A Comparative Study of Two Agricultural Industries in a Central County.” Journal of Nanjing Agricultural University (Social Sciences Edition), 2023, 23(02): 45–60. DOI: 10.19714/j.cnki.1671-7465.2023.0024.

Foodthink contributor

Sang Kun

PhD in Sociology, China Agricultural University. Research interests include the sociology of agriculture, social theory, urban-rural development, and cultural anthropology. Has led projects including a Youth Project of the National Social Science Fund and a General Grant from the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation. Published 7 articles in CSSCI-indexed journals. Recipient of the 2022 Beijing Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. Currently a Boya Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Researcher in the Department of Sociology at Peking University.

Editor: Ze’en