He Opened a Noodle Factory to Fund His Farming
Three months ago, a young couple who had returned to their hometown to farm in Gansu welcomed a baby, whom they named “Maizi” (Wheat). On WeChat Moments, the mother, Shi Tou, wrote: “We hope our little Maizi, born of the Shi Tou fields, will grow as resilient as our sandy Red-Head wheat, tread the path of life with steady determination, love themselves and others, remain clear-eyed and kind, cherish the gift of life, and embrace every experience. May Shi Tou, Maizi and Hua Hua journey through life side by side, supporting one another, each carving out their own broad road ahead.”
Before little Maizi’s arrival, father Hua Hua and mother Shi Tou had already been cultivating the land in their Gansu homeland for nearly a decade. They also launched “Yan Gui Qing”, a brand specialising in flour products made from “Red-Head” wheat, a traditional variety of the north-west. Among young people returning to their roots, it is uncommon to actually go and set up one’s own noodle-processing factory—and they did just that.
Yet, what Hua Hua truly longed for was to cultivate the land himself, particularly growing chickpeas. As a child, he lived on the hills outside Wuwei, where chickpeas used to grow wild along the edges of every field and plot. Fried and eaten straight from the pan, they were wonderfully aromatic.
In the 1990s, under a government policy to consolidate settlements, the family moved down to a village beside the Yellow River irrigation canal and stopped growing chickpeas altogether. That memory, however, never faded; it became the very reason he eventually returned home to till the soil.
Once he actually returned, the sheer volume of day-to-day tasks—securing land, overseeing planting, setting up the factory, hiring staff, managing sales, running live streams—left Hua Hua with little time to tend the chickpea fields with the care they deserved.
Milling flour meant a steady income; farming the land meant almost certain losses. Faced with the hard maths of cash flow, payment delays and financial risk, how could they stay true to their original commitment to ecological farming? The answer Hua Hua and Shi Tou settled on was a sobering one: first, they simply had to survive.
I. Sharing the Risk
But in 2016, upon returning home, he found himself acting as a ‘middleman’. Through the Yanguqing cooperative platform, he partnered with local farmers to purchase a heritage grain: gravel-field Hongguangtou wheat. This indigenous variety is cultivated on dry plots blanketed with Gobi stones across the Hexi Corridor region. While its yields are modest, the grain offers a deep, wheaty fragrance and a firm, chewy bite, making it ideal for flour and noodles. For a young returnee in his twenties with little to no capital, the upfront cost of leasing land far outweighed processing expenses; acting as an intermediary turned out to be the more prudent way to launch a venture.
This was far from Hua Hua’s original vision. He had initially hoped to lease farmland from local villagers and cultivate it himself. However, after three consecutive years of poor harvests on the two or three dozen mu he secured in his home village, he had to rethink his approach. In this desert climate—where farming relies heavily on rainfall and intense evaporation drains the soil—the yield of Hongguangtou wheat hinges almost entirely on precipitation. Output can dip below 100 jin per mu and rarely tops 400 jin, amounting to just a fraction of conventional crop yields. Consequently, farmers have steadily consolidated into larger operations; nowadays, it is seldom seen to find smallholders managing merely a few dozen mu.
Between 2017 and 2018, Hua Hua weathered the departure of his business partners and was forced to start over alone. Past media coverage had labelled his entrepreneurial journey ‘a series of setbacks’. Fortunately, 2018 brought a turning point when he met Shitou, a young woman from Shaanxi. Steady and grounded, true to her name, she joked that she had been ‘lured’ to the area by the rich aroma of Hongguangtou flour.
That same year, Hua Hua also connected with a new partner: Uncle Su, a large-scale grain farmer from Jingtai Sitan Township, roughly 80 kilometres from Gulang County. The region is equally suited to growing Hongguangtou wheat, and Uncle Su alone had reclaimed nearly 1,000 mu of gravel fields. With his help and oversight, Hua Hua successfully brokered agreements to purchase wheat from growers managing around 2,000 mu across Sitan Township.
Shitou explains that in recent years, amid a sluggish local economy, Hongguangtou wheat has struggled to sell at home. Priced at ¥2 per jin—double the cost of ordinary wheat—it has seen poor demand, leaving farmers with warehouses overflowing with surplus grain stockpiled over several years. This situation has made Hua Hua’s ‘large-scale’ purchasing considerably easier: he offers to buy the grain for a few jiao more per jin, sometimes bidding up to ¥2.6 or ¥2.7.
In a sense, Hua Hua’s ability to partner with local growers and source wheat that meets ecological standards comes down to a straightforward economic calculation. When drought caps crop yields, the marginal gain from chemical fertilisers is virtually negligible. Over the past few years, average yields for Hongguangtou in Sitan Township have hovered just above 100 jin per mu. Even if farmers habitually apply 3 to 5 jin of chemical fertiliser per mu, this economically inefficient practice is easily phased out.
More importantly, herbicides are simply unnecessary on newly reclaimed gravel fields. Before being blanketed with stones, these plots were barren wastelands exposed to wind and sun, with very few weed seeds naturally present. For the first decade, barely any weeds would take root.
Hua Hua acknowledges that this collaborative purchasing model shifts a portion of the risk onto the farmers: should crops fail completely or the flour fail to sell, Yanguqing bears no financial loss. He also structures payments so that he settles the previous batch only upon purchasing new grain, keeping his own cash flow relatively healthy. Yet, it remains a pragmatic win-win born of necessity. As an outsider to the village, leasing land himself would mean higher rents and exposing him to far greater risks than those already shouldered by the local farmers.
Uncle Su is also better positioned than Huahua to oversee the cooperative farmers. As the local “king of farm machinery”, he controls the equipment supply. This gives him a grip at the source, enabling him to see exactly which villagers need to hire out machinery for spraying pesticides.
This premium flavour, however, does not translate into greater income for the villagers of Sitan Township. Backed by government funding, the township has started constructing water reservoirs, with plans to roll out drip irrigation and create high-standard farmland. Once the drought constraint is removed, farmers will likely flock to cultivate more lucrative conventional fruits and vegetables suited to sandy soil. Balancing ecological preservation with economic survival is a fraught challenge, meaning their cooperation with Huahua may not be sustainable in the long term.
Fortunately, the village pipeline installation has been put on hold again. Huahua has yet to find new cooperative farmers. Instead, he intends to lease a plot near the noodle factory to run another “trial”, this time skipping the stone-mulching method and sowing Hongguangtou directly.
Two: Venturing into Processing
Turning wheat into profit fundamentally comes down to processing it effectively and getting it to market.
Initially, however, processing noodles was unprofitable. At the third-party factory, once the line was running, it would churn out large batches. If turnover was slow, the stock would simply sit in the warehouse waiting to turn rancid, leading to significant wastage.
Milling the flour also added to the costs. At their highest, processing fees reached 800 yuan per tonne, though by 2023 they had dropped to 300 yuan per tonne.
The chance presented itself in 2023. A village-collective noodle factory in Zhitang Town, Wuwei, was struggling and put up for lease. The modest facility came with all the requisite production licences and offered plenty of floor space, so Huahua and Shitou decisively took it on.
Owning “their own” noodle factory gave Yanguqing its first real control over production. With three or four full-time staff on hand, they process and pack several different noodle varieties. Trial runs for new flavours are now simpler, and they can also process batches for fellow farmers, earning a service fee. They now operate nearly every day, turning out 150 to 200 kg daily and working through 100 tonnes of flour a year.
If sales pick up, scaling production is certainly feasible. Uncle Su’s village alone has 4,000 mu of newly reclaimed sandy land that can supply over 400 tonnes of flour—four times their current annual usage.
Yet the two of them are stretched thin. Yanguqing had intended to hire a full-time hand for factory management as early as 2024. By 2025, they also wanted to recruit a dedicated live-streamer, given how popular live-stream sales have become within their ecological farming circle. Shitou’s broadcasts of the noodle-pulling process from the sandy fields yielded strong results in the first half of the year. But in the second half, with his partner approaching her due date and order volumes rising, their small household grew increasingly hectic, and the live streams were put on hold again.
III. Rain Drenches the ‘Chickpea Dream’
But dreams inevitably collide with reality—the chickpea crops are frequently lost entirely. After four years of operating at a loss on this land, he has had no choice but to scale back his operations to a 200-mu plot in one of the villages.
“The weeds are back everywhere!” was the first thing Huahua said as he crossed the fence and stepped into the field. It’s a ninety-minute drive from his home, and with his time stretched so thin, he simply cannot make it out here often.
In Gansu province, where irrigation is scarce and dry farming dominates, Huahua once felt incredibly lucky to have leased this fertile patch of land with its reliable natural rainfall, especially at the bargain rate of just 100 yuan per mu.
He never expected the rain to be so plentiful. The moment he pulled the weeds, they sprang back up, becoming his single biggest expense.
In June last year, to clear weeds from a 100-mu plot, he hired labourers for a whole month straight. At the peak, he had as many as 60 people working in a single day. At a rate of 500 yuan per mu, the total cost came to nearly 50,000 yuan.
This year, he changed his approach to hiring. He now uses his own electric vehicle to bring casual labourers from the village at 120 yuan a day per person. The car only fits four workers, so he hired a second vehicle as well; with the driver and hire costs included, it came to 160 yuan per person for all eight workers. With the farming season in full swing, Huahua rises before 5 a.m. to drive the workers to the fields, drops them back in the village at 7 p.m., and doesn’t get home until after 8.
The rainfall has been even heavier this year, so one round of weeding is no longer enough. Yet if he were to weed again, “even selling the chickpeas at 50 yuan a jin, I’d still be out of pocket.”
It was also this year that he heard for the first time that the local Tibetan farmers had started using herbicides too.
Apart from the weed problem, excessive rainfall causes this cold-hardy, dry-loving legume to grow lank and leggy—focusing on stem growth at the expense of seed production. Squeezing the chickpea pods still in the ground reveals they are hollow. August is normally the critical phase for chickpea development.
Huahua says that if the skies clear, the hollow pods may yet fill out. But if the rain continues, this year’s harvest will be severely compromised. After the National Day holiday, Tianzhu will see its first snow, bringing the growing season to a close.
Last August, Tianzhu experienced continuous rain for an entire month. The downpour persisted into September, leaving the dark soil muddy and clinging to boots for two or three days, which hindered the harvest. The chickpeas developed tiny black mould spots, making them unappealing to buyers. Even though Huahua and Shitou sorted them twice—combining machine and manual methods—and explicitly noted the condition on the sales platform, some customers still requested refunds upon delivery.
This August, while we were walking through the fields in Tianzhu, the sky turned heavy with clouds just before three in the afternoon. Not long after climbing into the car, pelting rain began to drum against the windows.
Provided the financial losses aren’t crippling, Huahua has no intention of abandoning this picturesque private plot, which he envisions as a future retirement haven. He is considering laying plastic mulch over the chickpea field next year to suppress the rampant weeds. This would inevitably increase labour costs. Previously, Huahua and Shitou operated the tractors and seeders themselves, with expenses limited to a few dozen yuan per mu for seeds and diesel.
“I’m putting in a significant investment just to enjoy life here,” he remarks.
IV. The Gamble of Farming
Chickpeas command a high price and enjoy strong market acceptance. Huahua can also source local heritage varieties from relatives and individual vendors at farmers’ markets. Provided there is no severe weather, it is genuinely worth scaling up production.
He has also expanded his flaxseed cultivation. Flaxseed is more resilient to both drought and waterlogging, yielding more stable harvests. In fact, before this year’s harvest, an ecological processor had already secured his entire flaxseed crop. Granted, when factoring in costs for transport, oil extraction, packaging, and sales, the buy-in price may not be particularly high. Since flaxseed is also grown in Gansu and Qinghai, competition for supply is fierce. Huahua is hesitant to take the risk of increasing production too drastically.
One year, encouraged by the county government, Huahua also tried growing goji berries. The crop is delicate and labour-intensive, yet it can still fetch 10 to 20 yuan per jin in the conventional market, offering substantial returns.
Unexpectedly, however, the seedlings provided to the farmers were faulty, and the goji crop was completely wiped out. On 200 mu of land, Huahua lost several hundred thousand yuan. Someone in the neighbouring village even lost over two million—they were spraying pesticides once a week and had dozens of workers weeding the fields daily. In the end, officials from the Forestry and Fruit Bureau were taken into custody, and the promised government subsidy of 200 yuan per mu never materialised. Huahua was actually relieved he had managed his plots with less intensity and hadn’t poured too much money into it.
In this sense, farming is not merely a matter of crunching numbers; it is a gamble. Beyond natural disasters and seasonal timing, fluctuations in buy-in prices, and defects in seedlings and seeds, seem to leave farmers utterly defenceless.
In another village in Tianzhu where Huahua operates, the government once mandated the planting of broad beans. Broad beans require processing before they can be sold, and demand within the ecological agriculture niche is low, so Huahua was initially reluctant to grow them. Coincidentally, however, market prices for broad beans were high that year, fetching five or six yuan per jin. Huahua sold his crop in the conventional market and made over 20,000 yuan—a sum he used entirely to plug the losses from other crops that year.
Among Huahua’s fellow farmers in Gansu, the unpredictability of prices is most starkly illustrated by onions: investing several thousand yuan per mu, with yields nearing 10,000 jin. When the buy-in price hits 0.5 to 0.6 yuan per jin, a single mu can yield a profit of 1,000 to 2,000 yuan.
Yet, there are times when no buyers appear or prices plummet: when the buy-in price drops below 0.2 yuan, a bumper harvest becomes a year of bankruptcy. On short-video platforms, farmers in Gansu and Henan frequently post videos of onions rotting in the fields. “But have a look at how much money they make when things go well,” Huahua points out.
Farmers growing onions are much like gamblers. But in truth, the fate of most crops is much the same.
Consequently, some farmers believe that, faced with so many uncontrollable variables, it is better to leave their fate to the heavens rather than gamble with the market.
Huahua in TianzhuThe farm cultivates chickpeas and flaxseed, alongside rotated crops of potato and buckwheat. We noticed that beneath a thick, luxuriant stand of buckwheat, a layer of potato shoots was still somehow ‘hidden’. This plot had been carefully sown with potatoes earlier in the year and covered with plastic mulch. However, the buckwheat that lodged last year scattered seeds across the soil, and has now completely upstaged the intended crop. The wild, untended buckwheat has already outpaced the carefully cultivated potatoes.
“Why don’t we just harvest the buckwheat?” we suggested.
“I was thinking the same,” Huahua replied.
“Another ‘unexpected harvest’,” he mused, his tone somewhere between wry resignation and quiet optimism.
V. How a Northwest Man Put Down Roots
When describing the most common wild animal on the northwestern grasslands—the marmot—he told us, “You know, the one in the memes, screaming ‘aaaah’.” He practically mimed the facial expressions and posture.
He also recounted a hog badger that recently wandered into the chicken coop—a creature rarely seen locally. “It had a chicken in its mouth, its belly soft and loose, just like mine. It strolled right past me, completely unbothered, showing zero respect!”
His family recalls that Huahua was always bright, but after transferring to a private high school with a poor academic environment, he lost his appetite for formal study. He headed straight to Xinjiang to work, eventually gained entry to a second-tier university, and then took a leave of absence to join rural development and community-supported agriculture initiatives. Back in 2018, his WeChat account regularly shared articles exploring the ecological challenges of farming on sandy soil. Today, he remains steadfast in his commitment to cultivating without chemical pesticides or synthetic fertilisers.
Huahua admits that in the past, he often acted on a whim, muddling through things. When he returned to the village in 2016, he once kept five or six dogs, describing himself as a sort of “gang leader”: whenever he went out, the dogs followed in a grand procession, “looking incredibly imposing.”
He enjoyed exploring and venturing out. Whenever he came across an unfamiliar junction, he’d always feel compelled to turn down it, walk it all the way to the end, and see what lay there. He practically knew every inch of the villages and towns around his home.
But reaching his forties, he genuinely wanted to “settle down” and prove to his family that his ecological farming was a reliable, promising “proper business.” He “disbanded” the pack of dogs, keeping just two to guard the noodle factory.
Shitou took over the account books from Huahua, ensuring every agricultural input and purchase was properly logged. Huahua’s more “ambitious” new ideas (during our visit, he was even in discussions with a local premium vinegar producer about processing noodle vinegar) were not automatically approved. He sometimes tempted himself with the idea of secretly expanding his crops behind Shitou’s back, but more often than not, he simply reflected on how much peace of mind a good wife brings.
Early on the morning of 22 September, Shitou gave birth to a baby boy, with both mother and child safe and well. The household now had more expenses to cover. After the National Day holiday, the chickpeas from Tianzhu would also have to be harvested by Huahua himself.
Unless otherwise stated, all photographs in this article were taken by the author.
Editor: Tianle