In the Countryside, Learn to Be a Living Seed

I have written about those who dwell upon the land and how they hold it close; I have listened to the rustle of wind sweeping across wheat fields in films; I have read accounts of the profound bond between farmers and the soil. And yet, I struggled to sense the countryside or the earth through the food I consumed each day. This paradox occasionally left me grappling with a nameless sense of cognitive dissonance.

This spring, I enrolled in Foodthink’s “Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme” and made my way to Yilin Farm in Conghua, Guangzhou. Stepping beyond the supermarket shelves, warehouses, and cold-chain logistics, I set out onto actual soil, hoping to understand food and the living memories it carries.

The journey from Guangzhou’s old town to Yilin Village unfolded slowly. It was only when the manicured roadside plantings faded away, replaced by hardy weeds pushing through cracks in the concrete and a growing variety of trees, that the true breath of the countryside finally reached me. Stepping out of the vehicle, an April heatwave washed over me, accompanied by the drone of swarming insects. I felt my own body stir to life, marking the beginning of a vivid stretch of days at this Guangzhou farm.

I. Chickens, Birds, and Blueberry Trees

The blueberries are currently in full harvest. Yet stepping on the plastic mulch are not only people, but clucking chickens too. In the valley, the hens emerge from their coop, cross the grass, and leap up to the blueberry bushes. They wander patiently among the young plants, utterly focused, waiting for fruit to drop. When a berry falls—nudged loose by a passing visitor—it must land with considerable force, for in a flash, a flock will scramble towards the sound, beaks agape, vying for the prize. Eventually, the chickens learned to shadow the visitors. They fall in quickly at the sight of a human, and if we pause, they gently peck at our boots to prompt us on. As we stroll down the pathways between the rows, our arms brushing the branches, the overripe berries drop to the ground. Follow the humans, and there will be fruit to eat—a May arrangement readily understood by the flock.

The movement of livestock is also central to Permaculture: Keep the chickens and the flock on the move! Let them clear out overwintering pests in spring, feed on overripe fallen fruit in summer, pick through the cereal fields for scattered grain in autumn, and their scratching will naturally loosen the topsoil. Perhaps we ought to learn to view the land through a chicken’s eyes. After spending enough time outdoors, the chickens have carved out a life of their own. They have a habit of leaving droppings everywhere. After gorging on blueberries, their blue-black droppings catch the sunlight, and we often reflect that this, too, is one way for the berries to cycle back into the earth. Now and then, we come across smooth-sided pits in the sand beneath the blueberry bushes. Fallen leaves line the bottom, and chickens often loiter nearby. We imagine these are nesting scrapes dug by the hens, where an egg was once laid among the leaves.

The dense thickets of blueberry bushes attracted fruit-eating birds. We once tried to drive them off with bird calls broadcast through a loudspeaker, but the sheer unfamiliarity of cross-species communication far exceeded our grasp; the songbirds never paused on account of it. Blueberry bushes crave sunlight, so during the rain-drenched April in the valley below, you’d rarely spot a berry. Only here and there up on the hillside might you find two or three. The birds invariably beat us to the ripe fruit at the summit, settling into the foliage with cheerful chirps. Chickens are easy to spot, but the birds are all sound. By the time you follow the noise with your eyes, only empty branches are left behind. By late April, blueberries had sprouted haphazardly across the hilltop. The birds grew even more vociferous, much to the chagrin of Master Ma, who led the other women into cover among the bushes, scouring for traces of the greedy visitors. Sometimes, before you’d even seen anyone climbing the hill, Master Ma’s calls would echo ahead.

Master Ma would cup her hands into a makeshift trumpet and loudly shout “hu-du-du” or sometimes “hu-lu-lu” to shoo the birds away. She insists these mimic bird calls. We remain sceptical, but after a volley of them, the fruit-eaters do indeed quiet down for a spell. May brought rain across the hills. The weather, and our moods along with it, turned muddy. Saturated with moisture, the blueberries grew waterlogged, and more were beaten down to the ground. Neither birds nor chickens could reach them in time; they were left to feed the soil. June is drawing to a close. The blueberries have vanished. Lychee trees in the valley have come into fruit, and the birds and chickens have returned to their branches. The sandpit remains beneath the blueberry bushes.

In early summer at Yinlin, the weeds grow thick. We spend our days clearing the fields, the sun baking our skin relentlessly. The roar of the brush cutter echoes in our ears, while our noses gradually grow accustomed to the complex, earthy scents of the compost. Our clothes are dusted with grass clippings, and we finish with hair that carries the sharp, green tang of cut weeds. The hems of our trousers, too, are peppered with Bidens seeds. Their tiny barbs hook on to us, hitching a ride as we move on, before taking root and sprouting swiftly elsewhere, growing slender and vigorous.

The world, from the vantage point of a Bidens plant, must be vertical and three-dimensional. Its roots delve downwards into darkness and moisture, its stems stretch upwards chasing sunlight and wind, while its seeds spread horizontally in all directions, hitching rides on anything in motion to claim new territory. It entrusts its future, quite unreservedly, to those who happen to pass by.

The black goats are fellow “colleagues” on the farm, tasked with weeding, but their tendency to eat almost anything causes considerable consternation for the rest of the staff. They favour appearing quietly, in pairs and threes, like a drifting black shadow. Working with the black goats brings both delight and vexation. In the morning, we may be pleased to see them have cleared a patch of weeds; by the afternoon, we might be dismayed to discover that a colleague’s freshly sown seedlings or thriving herb bed has been turned into their lunch. The black goats’ absolute favourite, however, is Spanish needle. As gourmands of wild grasses, they bypass the tough, coarse old stalks and use their nimble lips to precisely pluck the topmost, tenderest leaves of the Spanish needle. This is exactly the part of the plant where its vitality peaks, just before it flowers and sets seed.

One day, farm colleague Huang Xing followed the black goats, gathering tender Spanish needle to bring back to the kitchen. Served on the table, the Spanish needle was exceptionally delicious, carrying a faint, grassy astringency. We jokingly dubbed this particularly tender variety “Black Goat’s Choice”. Huang Xing remarked that perhaps this is exactly how we ought to live: eating what grows naturally between heaven and earth, just as the black goats do.

III. Corn Like Water

In May, the farm’s corn harvest came in under a storm. Counting the days, this batch of corn arrived on this land almost simultaneously with my own, making us something of a cohort. When husking the cobs in the field, the experienced women could simply pinch a cob to tell if the kernels were plump enough to make the ‘first grade’ cut (farm produce is graded by appearance: first, second, and reject grade). Their knack for it left me in awe—I still had to run my hand carefully around the entire cob to check for gaps. For the days that followed, corn practically ruled our plates.

From an urban perspective, corn is always presented with kernels golden and plump. I had never considered that it, too, could be left incomplete, or how it could be shaped by the elements: the tassel atop the stalk relies on the wind to shower pollen down onto the ears below. The silks of the female ear catch the dust, each one destined to nurture a single kernel. Yet days of relentless rain soaked through the silks, interrupting this pollination.

Picture it: on a cob, the kernels are meant to lock tightly together within a confined space, forming a perfect tessellation. But where pollination fails, it is as though a sudden gap appears in a water-filled vessel, and the order dissolves—the kernels begin to ‘flow’ and spread out towards the open edges. Every single kernel is a living seed.

Thinking back to supermarket shelves or fresh-produce delivery apps, corn appears as the paragon of industrial aesthetics: straight as a ruler, its kernels so plump they seem to obey the golden ratio, standing like a static sculpture in bright yellow, all proclaiming the flawless order moulded by capital. Yet on the farm, a cob’s journey from field to table never rests. As it transforms from a living seed into food, it takes on varied forms: curved, petite, lopsided with kernels missing on one side and full on the other… Corn on the farm is fluid; it breathes, grows, and shifts shape in the earth.

“Yet this is the corn that tastes sweeter and carries a richer flavour!” Brother Feng, who spent years working at a film studio before returning to rural life, chuckled. He casually picked up another cob, peeled back the husk, and revealed a patchwork of uneven kernels.

4. The Unfathomable Tree

On an evening after the rain, at Pengcheng Life Farm, which borders Yinlin Farm, one can catch the most beautiful moment of Yinlin Village. From a higher vantage point, the entire village seems to sink into a radiant sunset. Close by, lychee trees clinging to raindrops are scattered across the landscape; tiny red spheres have crept up the branches, stirring both delight and a craving for their taste. As Teacher Pengcheng and I wandered among them, he patiently answered my questions about the cultivars, their maintenance, and the sandbags dangling from the boughs. The way he frowned in thought brought to mind the silent ancient trees on the mountain—when someone takes root in a stretch of land for years, tending the trees with devotion, there comes a fleeting moment when they, too, live as a tree themselves.

Pengcheng told me that a few years back, while practising natural farming, he had attempted to ‘dwarf’ the lychee trees. He hung half-bags of sand from the tips of the branches, weighing them down and pulling the limbs away from the sky. “It shortens the distance nutrients have to travel. More sunlight, more fruit.” Over the tea table, Pengcheng spoke of these years of trials, a touch of resignation in his voice. “The results, well… weren’t quite what I’d hoped.” He pointed towards a lychee tree further out. “Look at that ‘Huai Zhi’ tree. I planted it originally just to block pesticide drift from the neighbouring plot. I never tended it, simply let it run wild. And yet this year, it’s actually yielded a remarkably heavy crop.” He chuckled lightly. “Trees, really, are a mystery.”

This year, he again plans to use fermented enzyme farming—utilising enzymes produced through fermentation alongside complex microbial consortia to protect and nourish the fruit trees. The results remain to be seen; he is still feeling his way through it. In his spare time, Peng Cheng once shared a story about “conversing” with all living things. The place had once been plagued by termites, which spread from the lychee tree trunks right into the corners of the kitchen. One quiet afternoon, Peng Cheng resolved to open his heart and speak candidly to the termites, telling them of his recent circumstances, his troubles, and the boundaries needed for them to coexist. The termites continued their busy work, and he quietly let it go. Yet the following day, there were noticeably fewer termites on the main trunk; a few days later, they had completely vacated it, abandoning even the nests they had built. In the words that drifted into the air, that quiet desire for respect and understanding seemed to have truly been received.

V. Lychees Off the Branch

Not far from Pengcheng Farm, the hills of Liuzhai and Lizhai hold the footprints of generations past. While picking lychees with some local women, they began to recount the land’s history to satisfy my curiosity about the blueberry orchard’s origins. Their fathers had once logged and cleared the slopes; their grandfathers had hunted in these valleys; and some thirty to fifty years ago, they themselves broke new ground to plant the lychee trees. The land has since changed hands several times in recent years. Today, blueberry plants carpet almost the entire valley, and only within the ancient lychee grove at the foothills and among a few scattered veteran trees on the ridge can one still savour the true flavour of time.

The Nuomici and Guiwei lychee trees before us were planted by the older women when they first reclaimed the land. Guo Rui, who manages Yinlin Farm, inspects the thick roots and guesses the trees must be around fifty years old. Yet the women who were there insist otherwise: “Fifty? No way. They were planted on a fine day in the eighties—just thirty years ago!”   Just as agile as Guo Rui, they scale the sturdy branches in a few quick movements and deftly snip off boughs heavy with fruit. Down below, you have to keep your eyes peeled; one moment’s distraction and you could be struck by falling lychees, broken branches, or even beehives and bird nests hanging in the canopy. But those fruits dangling highest, closest to the sky, always carry the richest flavour.

These lychee trees are my own age—both rooted on this planet at the close of the twentieth century, and twenty-five years later, I finally crossed paths with them on this fertile soil. For Guo Rui, learning to care for the twenty-odd lychee trees his parents planted is a task he must master.

Over the years, Guo has tended the family trees using the “wu wei” principle of natural farming: letting them grow freely, intervening as little as possible, and relying mostly on continuous observation. He points to a patch of trunk where the bark is stripped away in long, scar-like lines. “This tree once lost large swathes of bark to insects,” he explains. “When we found out, we trimmed back the upper branches to let sunlight pour through, which finally drove the pests away. The fruit it bore that year was intensely sour and astringent, of very poor quality.”Imagine the tree’s nutrient channels clogged, the sourness and astringency trapped and pooling inside the fruit; that year’s lychees were like the tree’s tears, rolling down one by one. Now, fresh bark heals upwards from the edges of the wound, slowly enveloping the old scars.

Guo Rui recalled that this verdant stretch of land in front of the café was once planted entirely with citrus trees, with those twenty-odd lychee trees interspersed among them. As it takes seven to eight years for a lychee tree to bear fruit, the older generations counted on the citrus trees to provide a financial return during that long unproductive period. Through conversations with another elder villager, Brother Zhong, we pieced together the shifting history of cash crops in Yinlin Village. In the 1980s, before the outbreak of citrus greening disease, Yinlin Village was blanketed with citrus groves; and before the widespread switch to citrus, the original crop had been rice. Today, however, the market price for lychees falls far short of the labour cost to harvest them, so villagers have left to seek other livelihoods elsewhere. “We’ve all been forgotten!” an old villager told us, standing beneath the broad canopy of a three-hundred-year-old lychee tree at the foot of Guanyin Mountain. “Nobody picks us, and nobody tends to us.”

Looking up from beneath the ancient lychee trees, I often imagine how mysterious and abundant the world up in the canopy must be. Perhaps Guo Rui never quite forgot those scenes, either; he spoke of an ancient lychee tree that once stood beside the village primary school. After school as a boy, he would often play hide-and-seek in its branches with his friends. It remains the tree he remembers most vividly. Eventually, the tree was felled to make way for a village road. Fewer people kept up the art of climbing, and his friends scattered in all directions. “The taste of lychee lingers on,” he smiled, then proceeded to recount his personal ranking of lychee flavours. He senses that even between southern cities close to one another, lychee flavour shifts with the slightest nuance of climate—flavour, much like people, drifts and migrates to distant places. After all, both trees and people must sink their roots deep into the soil.

VI. After Returning to the City

On the day I left Yinlin, the sunshine was just right, and the air still held the scent of damp earth and ripe guavas. I had set off early, catching sight of Guo Rui pruning branches, while villagers passed by the roadside carrying baskets, their hands full of vegetables freshly picked from the fields. It brought back memories of every midday in the kitchen, grappling with piles of unfamiliar vegetables, straining to picture what the meal would look like, while the air grew heavy with the smells of soil, leaves, and hot oil. I suddenly realised that those days in the village had quietly changed the way I viewed food. Food is not a point-to-point supply chain; it is a cycle—a flow from the earth to the hands, and back to the earth again.

I began to learn how to read vegetables and soil: which patches of earth would yield lush, soft plantain grass, and which kinds of fruit would develop thicker skins in the high summer heat. I also gradually came to understand that shared meals in Yinlin meant far more than simply eating together; they were a relationship of mutual care. We take in what the land gives, and in return, we must tend to its weariness.

Later, on an afternoon back in the city, I wandered aimlessly through the cool, air-conditioned aisles of a supermarket. Picking up a flawlessly shaped tomato, I was suddenly struck by a familiar stillness. What kind of earth did this tomato grow in? Had it too swayed in the wind and rain, ripened amidst the chirping of insects? What did its seeds look like?

The supermarket labels offered no answers. I simply stood before the self-checkout machine, scanning it. The price displayed on the electronic screen was merely its exchange value as a commodity.The vast life story erased behind it—the warmth of the soil, the turning of the seasons, the quiet bonds between people and the earth—cannot be measured in figures.

Foodthink Author

 Jia Ning

Writer and visual practitioner. Long-term focus on the intersections of climate, the body, and perception, exploring how humans and environments co-create one another through writing, sound, and fieldwork. Recent writing centres on land knowledge and the micro-experiences of everyday ecology, driven by a desire to get closer to more farms and understand the land.

 

 

 

Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme

The Lianhe Project “Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme” was initiated by Foodthink in 2021. It aims to support young people keen to pursue ecological agriculture, as well as established ecological farms. The programme helps young participants master farming knowledge and skills through hands-on practice, while preserving and passing on the expertise of veteran farmers. It also supplies farms with well-trained talent, injecting new vitality into rural communities.

To date, four recruitment cohorts have been completed, supporting over 80 participants across more than ten ecological farms nationwide, undertaking internships ranging from three months to a year.

All photographs in this article were taken by the author.

Editor: Zheng Yuyang