Hu Ge and Liu Tao Visited the Farm: Have the Melons Sold Yet?
In May, I left my job, said a temporary goodbye to Beijing, and headed to the Zhi Liang Tian Ecological Farm in Alxa, Inner Mongolia, where I spent two months. I didn’t expect that during my first month at the farm, I would be drinking every single day. Two-thirds of the beer in the farm’s coffee house went to the volunteers. Once the beer ran dry, people would dig out the farm’s homemade plum wine from the previous year and keep drinking well into the night.
Mostly, it was out of frustration.
“Why did you come here?” It was a question asked of me countless times over those two months, one I turned back on myself just as often. The unrefined, chaotic rhythm of daily life ahead of me seemed utterly absurd. My routine boiled down to collecting rubbish, mopping toilets, cooking rice, and brewing coffee for visitors. It was a world away from what I had initially expected when I set out to learn about agriculture in Alxa.
Eventually, I settled on a standard reply: “I came to endure hardship.”
Before resigning, I had worked as a business journalist for seven years. Those years coincided with the wave of internet-driven transformation in the fresh produce sector. I covered extensive industry news on agriculture and frequently travelled to rural areas, coming across fascinating regions and produce: cranberries from Fuyuan, honey oranges from Yongquan, kiwifruit from Dujiangyan, and so on.
But as time went on, these brief, three-day assignments orchestrated by major internet companies invariably fell back into a narrow, distribution-driven supply chain logic. Coupled with the way life repeatedly ground to a halt throughout 2022 and our increasingly shrinking radius of movement, I began to re-examine my work. Faced with so many contradictions, I felt a strong urge to escape that sense of stagnation.
In early 2023, I applied for the Foodthink ecological agriculture internship programme.First, I hoped to spend more time than a typical reporting trip to engage with the practical operations of an ecological farm and gain a grounding in agricultural production; second, I wanted to seize the chance to visit the Inner Mongolia Plateau, a vast landscape that has long held a romantic allure for me.
And so, Zhi Liang Tian in Alxa became the only option. It was the sole Inner Mongolian farm on the Foodthink internship roster, located in Bayanhot Town, Alxa Left Banner, Alxa League, just an hour’s drive from the Helan Mountains.
I. The melons have been harvested, but buyers are yet to be secured
Before departure, I skimmed through a selection of articles on the farm’s WeChat Official Account and listened to podcasts featuring farm owner Ma Yanwei. I discovered that the “Ecological Desert Melons” concept is underpinned by a deeply personal mission: Ma, an ecology master’s graduate from Northeast China with a background in charity work, chose to settle in Alxa to pioneer water-saving agriculture.
I’m not drawn to the sentimental narratives; over the years I’ve heard them too often, and the failures have far outnumbered the successes. Nevertheless, this farm has endured for eight years, expanding its cultivated land to 160 mu. Available information shows its farm produce sales have turned a profit, and it has begun to build a brand reputation. I set out determined to understand how it succeeded.
I arrived at Zhiliangtian Farm in July, just as the melon selling season was about to begin. Within days of my arrival, I was pulled into a sales meeting. That very first gathering stripped away any illusions and quickly quenched my curiosity about the melon trade.
The melons in the fields were nearing harvest. Ma Yanwei had invited a friend from town who worked in live-streaming e-commerce to brainstorm sales strategies. At the start of the meeting, he said, “Our primary goal this year is simply to avoid unsold stock.” Before he could finish the sentence, the friend cut in, “No, no, no. That’s the bare minimum. We can’t settle for just covering our basics; we have to find a way to actually turn a profit. Look at you: you’ve laboured all year, weathered and sun-browned—that’s all costing you something.”
Hearing that exchange, I realised that the “thin profits” Ma Yanwei spoke of so often in podcasts weren’t mere modesty after all. The farm’s sales were far from smooth sailing; it was still struggling to stay afloat, constantly hovering around the survival line.
Throughout the meeting, the friend kept offering advice: run more live streams on Douyin; connect as quickly as possible with local distributors who can handle premium produce, and try to build a name for yourself in the local market. Emboldened by this, over the following days, Ma Yanwei would wake two young volunteer men from Beijing—both born in the 2000s—at 6 a.m. to join him for live-streamed melon pre-sales on Douyin. Unfortunately, each session pulled in only about a hundred viewers.
Two weeks later, I was dragged into another sales meeting. The moment I stepped into the office, the oppressive silence and the sight of everyone holding their heads in their hands told the story—selling farm produce is genuinely hard work. Much of the strategy laid out in the meeting at the start of the month had been shelved simply because no one was implementing it. The daily live streams, for example, had largely dried up once the two young volunteers from Beijing departed.
Yet by now, the melons had been harvested on schedule and were piling up in the fields.
Their refusal was entirely expected: supermarkets all operate according to their own procurement procedures. This is particularly true for organic fruit. Retailers typically negotiate purchase volumes and price bands with farms well ahead of the growing season, rather than scrambling to source produce at the eleventh hour. Moreover, buyers impose their own strict specifications regarding cosmetic appearance, weight grading, and pricing—conditions that growers are not always able, or willing, to meet.
It reminded me of a visit I made two years ago to an organic farm in the Beijing suburbs that was partnered with Hema. There, the farm manager openly disputed the buyer’s standards regarding insect-bitten leaves, right in front of the press. The manager believed Hema’s grading criteria were overly stringent. To him, leaves riddled with insect holes were clear evidence that no pesticides had been used. Yet, failing to meet Hema’s cosmetic standards, such produce had to be culled in large quantities, pointlessly adding to the farm’s losses. Hema’s buyer, however, stood firm, arguing that vegetables with unappealing appearances would simply deter customers from buying them. On top of that, to align with Hema’s sales cycles, the farm shifted its entire model away from crop diversification towards monoculture—a significant concession made purely for commercial viability.
Even with access to channels as lucrative as Hema, many ecological farms continue to struggle to stay afloat. The outlook is hardly better for operations like Zhiliangtian, which lack a reliable sales network altogether.
II. How do we market high-priced organic melons?
E-commerce allows farms to sell directly to consumers, but it does little to cut cultivation and sales costs. In fact, it tends to inflate marketing and logistics expenses. In the current economic climate, retailers are increasingly focused on value for money. Even Hema, long touting ‘consumption upgrading’, has made a full shift to discounting this year.
I am frequently reminded of a conversation about ‘market positioning’ that took place during an online co-learning session organised by Foodthink for interns and farm mentors—
When a young person planning to return home to practise ecological farming asked the group of farm owners about production issues related to yield, Dahei from Xi’an’s Lüwo Farm cut in: ‘Hold off on those finer details for now. Production problems can always be sorted out. What you need to figure out first is where your market actually is.’
‘Farming is actually fraught with a raft of complex questions: How do you select your varieties? Will you be selling raw produce or processed foods? What’s your approach to branding and marketing? How do you position yourself in the market? These are things you need to work out upfront; yield is merely the foundation. After all, we’re competing in a market. You might be able to lean on your network in the early days, but once the farm matures, these are issues you simply cannot ignore,’ said Dahei, who had already set up a biscuit-processing facility on the farm and secured distribution through several steady channels.
Zhi Liangtian has now entered this later, commercialisation phase. A few years back, Ma Yanwei tapped into the melon market by leveraging his charity-backed story and personal network. Yet, as his customer base broadened and the melon market faced oversupply in recent years, the business has grown steadily harder to sustain. Climate conditions in 2022 led to crop losses and unsold stock at the farm. This year, to mitigate risk, management deliberately cut the melon cultivation area by nearly half, yet sales remain a persistent source of worry for everyone.
The farm cultivates three melon varieties: Jin Hongbao, Xizhou Mi and Bai Yindi. Although their ripening periods are staggered, each variety is only on sale for just over a month, and they do not keep for long. Large retailers can guarantee a summer-long melon supply by sourcing different varieties at various stages of ripeness from across the country, but a single farm simply cannot stretch its harvest season to cover the entire summer.
With land rents and other overheads climbing in 2023, the cost per crate of melons rose by a further ten yuan, pushing the retail price including free delivery for a single melon to nearly fifty yuan. Each time someone slices open a melon brought straight from the fields, I can’t help but joke: ‘I couldn’t possibly afford one at that price.’ It is simply not a figure the mass market will accept. In the local market, non-organic melons go for a matter of jiao per jin, meaning the farm’s organic produce stands absolutely no chance in local wholesale markets.
III. The high costs of logistics and labour in the desert
By late July, the volunteers were rounded up and sent out to haul and pack the melons in the fields. I later came to realise that this was the only time during my two-month internship that I actually got to work on the farm.
On 28 July, Typhoon Doksuri made landfall in Fujian. The mass of moisture it had swept up from the Pacific reached the Helan Mountains by that evening. Thick cumulus clouds began to pile up on the eastern flank of the range, painted a deep red by the setting sun. The evening sky was breathtaking, and those heavy clouds continued to build up over the eastern slopes of the Helan Mountains for several days. But Teacher Ma remarked, “You might think the clouds over the Helan Mountains look romantic these past few days, but I find it anything but romantic.”
After the typhoon made landfall, weather forecasts warned of continuous rain across Zuoqi for the week ahead. The farm’s melons were just entering their sales window, and ripe fruit left in the field is dreadfully sensitive to wet weather. Heavy rain can cause the melons to split, rendering them unsellable. The farm had already suffered such losses in 2022. Determined not to repeat the mistake, they began an early harvest on 30 July, picking, packing, and stacking the melons at the farm before the rains set in.
That batch had been pre-ordered by the farm’s membership base. We set up a makeshift assembly line beneath the trees: one person folded packing cartons, another handled the weighing, a third inflated the air-column bags for cushioning, and another slid the melons inside.
The air-column bags let out a steady stream of pops, prompting someone to remark that it sounded rather like Chinese New Year firecrackers.
Ma Yanwei chuckled as he weighed the fruit. “Listen to that racket—guess what’s going through my mind?”
“How much does each burst bag set us back?” I replied.
Teacher Ma nodded. “Spot on. Half a yuan apiece.”
Each carton takes two melons, which means we burn through at least two cushioning bags per box. Even putting material wastage aside, the logistics and packaging alone push the cost to nearly 20 yuan for every carton.
Melons simply do not sit well with e-commerce models. Unlike kiwifruit, which continues to ripen off the vine and can be harvested early and stored in cold storage for months, melons lack the high unit value of cherries or blueberries. Every year, the very moment the fruit reaches peak ripeness and flavour is precisely when it becomes most fragile for long-haul transit.
To sell melons to distant markets without sacrificing flavour, the farm would need to work in lockstep with sales channels and logistics providers. By all accounts, the operation simply isn’t equipped for that yet.
Then there is the steep cost of labour—Alxa is notoriously difficult when it comes to keeping skilled hands on board.
Throughout July, it was clear that Teacher Ma had gathered a wealth of ideas from friends near and far. Yet the moment it came to rolling up our sleeves and getting on with it, things either descended into frantic disorganisation or simply fizzled out.
More often than not, I get the sense that what the farm truly lacks is reliable people to see things through. We need full-time staff dedicated to building and maintaining sales channels, managing brand operations and marketing, and overseeing quality control in tandem with production—roles that demand year-round attention. Yet we are down to just five full-time employees, all of whom are stretched far too thin. The volunteers who arrive each year like migratory birds can only offer so much.
Human capital is Alxa’s costliest commodity. Captain Zhao, who oversees production, put it bluntly: “If you want to get anything done around here, you simply can’t skimp on money.” Rural wages in the region now rival those on the coast. During the peak season, field hands pull in 200 yuan a day.
In truth, even Teacher Ma will admit that when you factor in the overheads—labour chief among them, plus the constant risk of unsold stock—the melon, the farm’s flagship product, has been running at a loss for years.
IV. Volunteers Thrown into the Deep End
Faced with such a long list of chores, many volunteers simply did what they felt like. While I could understand this, I just couldn’t stand people cutting corners in the kitchen. It was especially maddening when you were unlucky enough to follow an unreliable pair on the roster. Walking into the kitchen the next day, you’d be driven up the wall by what the previous shift had left behind: yesterday’s food waste still sitting and fermenting in the bin, not yet tipped into the compost pit; pots and pans left unwashed, filling with stagnant water in the sink; leftovers left out on the worktops, attracting hordes of flies overnight that were far more industrious than the volunteers.
Here I was, someone who never wanted to be a teacher, suddenly tasked with helping manage an educational tour of around twenty people. And here I was, barely knowing how to cook, having to rack my brains during my shift to put together a meal that could actually fill the stomachs of twenty-odd folks. On my first cooking shift, I messaged my roommate in Beijing: “I’m cooking dinner for seventeen people today!” Their reply: “I’ve got just one expectation: enough to go round, and properly cooked.”
After many a dinner, I would sit outside, gazing at the sunset glow on the horizon, beer in hand, quietly coming to terms with my own folly.
Yet those unexpected moments of absurdity only form part of the picture. More often, this place offered me deeply memorable experiences; otherwise, I would not have penned this earnest internship reflection. During the remainder of my time at the farm, I took charge of the café, encountered plenty of unforeseen stories, and through the people and events I came across, gradually began to understand why some choose to put down roots in this remote landscape. Tomorrow, I will continue sharing the tales I’ve collected from life on the farm.
To date, two recruitment cohorts have been completed, supporting over 40 participants across more than a dozen ecological farms nationwide for placements ranging from two months to a year. The second cohort will ‘graduate’ at the end of 2023, and the third cohort will open for public applications in January 2024! Please keep an eye out for updates on Foodthink’s ‘Ecological Agriculture Intern’ programme!
Editor: Xiong Yi