Lianxiang Farm: Eight Years of Fighting Monsters and Leveling Up in Ecological Agriculture
Departing from Beijing Chaoyang Station on a high-speed train, the journey takes just over an hour to Pingquan North Station in Chengde, Hebei. Yingying, the lady of Lianxiang Farm, is already waiting outside for us. Petite in stature, she sweeps her hair back in a neat ponytail, looking sharp and spirited, with a relaxed smile across her face. This was a PGS visit organised by the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market in early September. The farm’s vegetables, corn, peanuts and other produce are hugely popular at the market – the tomatoes in particular, sweet, juicy and bursting with flavour, ideal for munching like fruit. Our group of more than twenty included Market friends, ecological farming peers, agriculture students and others, all keen to discover the growing techniques behind Lianxiang Farm.
The farm is roughly an hour’s drive from the station. Past the town’s gleaming new apartment blocks, a timber processing plant at the foot of the hills and vast stretches of corn turning from green to gold, we arrive at Lianxiang. Left behind are Beijing’s grey smog and sweltering heat; here, beneath a blue sky streaked with white clouds, the farm nestled at the foot of green hills is pleasantly cool. Greeted by the clucking welcome of the free-range chickens, the master of the farm – Zhiqiang, crew-cut, dark-skinned and broad-shouldered – introduces everyone to the farm’s recent developments, while Yingying turns and slips into the kitchen, where two more dishes await her hand.
As it turns out, running the farm was originally Yingying’s idea. This couple, both born in the 1990s, met at an agricultural college. At the time, their families did not approve of them going into farming. But Yingying believed, “People will always have to eat, no matter when. If you do agriculture and can grow your own food, then however the wider world changes, we will always have something to eat.” This was no easy decision for the young couple. The villagers still hoped their children would leave the countryside and find stable, well-paid jobs in the city. In their eyes, doing what Zhiqiang’s female cousins had done – becoming programmers or teachers at the best high school in town – would have been a better choice. But once Yingying had made up her mind to run the farm, Zhiqiang decided to give her his wholehearted support, and to do “agriculture unlike anything our parents had done”.
I. Pests – The First Hurdle of Ecological Agriculture
What troubles Zhiqiang and Yingying – indeed every ecological grower – most is pests.
When the farm was just getting started, funds were limited and everything had to be invested bit by bit, so they chose to grow shiitake. Lianxiang’s shiitake soon became a must-buy at the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market. During this visit, one Market friend asked about those shiitake of old, still fond of them. Yet only two or three years after planting them, beetle infestations began. Picked mushrooms came crawling with tiny beetles, packed so densely you could barely see the cap. What is more, the beetles were remarkably tough – even sun-dried or frozen, they could still survive. They tried all sorts of remedies, but every one of them failed, and in the end they had no choice but to abandon shiitake.
Some people also asked about Lianxiang’s other signature crop – the tomatoes – and why they had been out of stock lately. After lunch, Zhiqiang and Yingying took us out to the fields. It turned out that, in addition to the cotton bollworm they have always had to watch for, the tomatoes had this spring been invaded by an alien species – the South American tomato leafminer. The moths lay their eggs on the leaves, and once the larvae hatch, they burrow into the tomato leaves and fruit. After the larvae feed, black holes form on the skin of the fruit, which not only spoils its appearance but also invites fungal infections, causing the fruit to rot. We stepped into the polytunnel and found that on one side a ripe tomato looked flawless, while the other side was riddled with dark marks where insects had gnawed away.
Zhiqiang casually picked a few of the insect-gnawed tomatoes and handed them to us. When we split them open, juice gushed out, and the taste was a refreshing balance of sweet and tangy. The dark spots only affected the surface; the flavour of the fruit itself was unspoiled. But such tomatoes cannot be sold as product. The women who work on the farm picked a whole basketful of tomatoes, yet barely a fraction could be salvaged for sale. The rest – Zhiqiang briskly carried them over to the chicken house and tossed them to the more than a thousand chickens.
II. Dreading Both Weeds and Herbicide
Fortunately, the heavy lifting of weeding is needed only during the seedlings’ early stage. Once the vegetables outgrow the weeds, the worry eases considerably. “Think of it this way: in an orchard, the trees are the big brothers – the grass can never outgrow them, so you can leave things be. A vegetable plot is a different story,” Zhiqiang explains. “Weeds grow faster than the crops. The moment you sow carrots, the seedlings are thin and frail, and you have to watch the sky constantly. The first rain comes and the weeds go wild. The day after it stops, you have to be in the field at dawn pulling them out. Three or four rounds of weeding later, once the carrot tops are well up, only then can you catch your breath.”
In addition, there is the constant vigilance needed against herbicide drifting in from neighbouring farmland. With the increasing use of aerially applied pesticides, cases of ecological farms being inadvertently contaminated have grown ever more common in recent years. In our PGS visit questionnaire, “If the farm neighbours conventional production, does it have a buffer zone in place, and how does it guard against pesticide drift?” is a mandatory question.
Although local villagers spray herbicide on the surrounding field crops of corn, first, to avoid waste, they tend to wait for windless days before spraying; second, Lianxiang Farm’s boundaries are well defined, and a road and a drainage ditch separate it from the adjacent conventional corn fields, offering a degree of protection. Even so, Zhiqiang says, after a heavy rain this year, water pooled in the fields, overflowed into the ditch and spilled across the road, so there is still cause to be wary of pesticide drift.
III. Extreme Heat – Sun-Scorched Tomatoes and Hens That Refuse to Lay
Southern Weekly reported that in mid-June, the day before harvest day, when temperatures in Chengde topped 40 °C, in just a few hours Lianxiang’s tomatoes had been scorched by the sun and could no longer be sold. The tomatoes that narrowly survived the heat were then left short of water, so their roots could not absorb calcium from the soil, and blossom-end rot set in, leaving their skins blotched with dark patches or mouldy-looking lesions.
As Lianxiang’s star product, tomatoes contribute a third of the farm’s profits. But, Zhiqiang said, in the past pest outbreaks had happened too, and because yields were high, they could still sell plenty. This year the pests are worse than ever, yet yields have fallen because of the heat and drought.
Even the hens were too hot to want to lay. Normally the farm’s more than a thousand chickens produce over three hundred eggs a day, but on those scorching days Yingying could collect barely fifty.
IV. The Hiring Dilemma
This year, recruiting has been harder than ever, and the unlikely culprit is the steadily rising price of wild sour jujube – a traditional Chinese medicinal ingredient said to have sedative, calming and sleep-improving properties. In past years, the market purchase price for wild sour jujube gathered from the hills was roughly 2 to 3 yuan per jin (500 g); this year it has surged to 15 yuan per jin. Going up the hills to pick wild sour jujube can earn a person up to 2,000 or 3,000 yuan a day, and villagers from the surrounding area have flocked to the hills. Because purchase prices fluctuate daily, many, to maximise their earnings, simply chop the trees down and shake the jujubes loose – a textbook tragedy of the commons.
V. Eight Years After the Return Home
Their daughter Ke’er, born on the farm in 2018, has reached school age. To give her a more stable school environment, the couple have divided their responsibilities: Zhiqiang holds the fort on the farm, while Yingying rents a place in Pingquan town and takes Ke’er to and from school. Each morning, after dropping Ke’er at school, Yingying takes a forty-minute drive back to the farm; in the afternoon she returns to town to collect Ke’er and stays the night. As a result, Yingying’s routine now resembles that of a nine-to-five commuter, except her office is the farm. Because of school, Ke’er only comes back to the farm on weekends, and Yingying needs more time to look after her, so the day-to-day farm work and management fall mainly on Zhiqiang’s shoulders.
Lianxiang Farm now covers just over fifty mu in total, with twenty-six mu under cultivation. Because winters in the north are too cold, open-field cultivation can only take place between May and October. Yingying has drawn up a diverse seasonal planting plan, supplying twenty to thirty varieties of vegetables year-round. Corn alone comes in sweet, waxy and heirloom varieties, and in November and December they also supply maize flour and maize grits. Peanuts are offered fresh, dried, shelled, or pressed into peanut oil. So that Ke’er can enjoy fresh fruit and vegetables through every season, the couple have rented three earth-walled sun greenhouses near the farm this year – their inner walls are rammed from yellow clay, offering excellent heat retention, so even in winter they can grow fruiting vegetables such as tomatoes.
Beyond the vegetable plots, Zhiqiang also looks after the livestock: local free-range hens, Silkies and barred-pattern hens strolling the cornfields, majestic geese, and a plump white pig kept for the New Year. Every bit of fruit and vegetable pecked by birds or nibbled by pests in the vegetable plots becomes feed for them – a rich and varied diet, possibly better than what us city folk manage. The farm also has two big dogs that keep an eye on the chickens and the pigs, and nine cats, each with its own distinct character, roaming all over the place.
From first supplying their produce to schools and other organic farms, to partnering with the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market, Yingying and Zhiqiang have decided to take a further step. Since 2019, Lianxiang has been trying to build a relationship of deep mutual trust with some of its regular customers – custom growing: “Whatever vegetables you like, we will grow them for you!” breaking away from the traditional Community Supported Agriculture model of “We have what we have, and you eat what’s on the menu.”
Eight years after Yingying and Zhiqiang came home, every year brings its share of difficulties, yet they have kept going and kept trying new things. Zhiqiang says: “Many disasters have hit the fields, and every stage of farming has its problems, but we still try to grow whatever we can. Because we grow such a wide mix of things, by year’s end there is always something to harvest.”
Family together, self-sufficient, rooted in the land, working the soil with steady hands, facing an uncertain world with optimism – is there a more reassuring life than this?
Illustrations in this article, unless otherwise credited,
are provided by Foodthink and the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market.
Editing: Lingyu