Nine Years Back Home, and I Only Feel I’m Just Starting to Get the Hang of It
I. The Loess Plateau Delicacies That Grew Up With Me
I am one of those born in the 1980s who grew up in the hills of the Loess Plateau. I love the mountains, I love the Loess Plateau, I love running wild among hillsides where the mountain flowers are in full bloom.
My hometown sits in the borderlands where Shanxi, Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia meet. As far as the eye can reach, terraced fields climb the plateau in layer upon layer, dwellings cluster along the contours of the slopes, and every structure draws its materials from the stone and loess earth of the Loess Plateau.
My father is a farmer and a stonemason. He often travels to villages in neighbouring Shanxi for work, forging stone mills and stone rollers, and building cave dwellings for others. The front face of a cave dwelling is made from bluestone or yellow facing stone, carved with floral patterns using a chisel. In my eyes, this is the most beautiful picture in the world. Each time the vault was closed, amid the crackle of firecrackers, we children would jostle among the adults, scrambling for the white-flour steamed buns the host family had marked with red dots.
Many of my childhood memories are bound up with food. Where we lived, we typically ate coarse-grain meals of oats, buckwheat, proso millet and glutinous-millet cake; vegetables merely supplemented what we grew in our own cave-yard in summer and autumn.
For the rest of the year, the staple was probably potatoes — we call them yam eggs. A single potato can be cut into shreds, strips, cubes, chunks, slices or balls, and Mother was always finding new ways to cook them for the family. As a small child, what I dreaded most was going down into the root cellar to fetch potatoes, because I was afraid of the spiders, centipedes, millipedes and even frogs lurking inside.
After the first rains of spring, we loved to go into the hills to gather ground-ear, a wild edible vegetable that carpets the soil. In summer, we picked wild chrysanthemums and tossed them with linseed oil; a cold salad of bean sprouts and wild bitter greens was truly something special. Or we simply boiled broad-bean pods and pea pods. For beating the heat, nothing quite beats chilled glutinous-millet cake or sour proso-millet porridge. In autumn, we would push a wooden wheelbarrow into the hills or gullies to gather sea-buckthorn berries. In winter, we ate yellow steamed buns and small sea-red crabapples, naturally frozen in the large earthenware jar.
These scenes of life cycling through the four seasons often warm me and give me solace.
II. Chemical Agriculture Made Me Hate Myself
Whenever I pulled on my rubber gloves and carefully unscrewed the lid of one of those big plastic drums brimming with thick, viscous liquid—green, red or blue—I had a fleeting sense of facing those demons from the old legends: blue-lipped, fang-bared, red-faced and wild-haired, the ghastly, blood-chilling creatures. With a slippery rush they seemed to lunge out of the drum mouth and pounce on you. The unbroken contact sent a rash erupting down the backs of my calves, an itching so fierce it was unbearable.
III. Food, and the Road Back
IV. The Eighty-One Tribulations of Entrepreneurship
Product selection was the critical challenge in those early days. My hometown sits in a dryland farming zone, where grain crops are wonderfully diverse. I started out putting everything on the market: oat groats, buckwheat groats, large-grain glutinous millet, proso millet, linseed oil, millet vinegar, pea flour, Hetao Plain flour, sea-buckthorn concentrate… Going all this wide meant every single item sold a little, but none of them sold enough to matter. These unprocessed agricultural products are heavy, bulky, easy for anyone to enter, hard to differentiate and yield low margins.
If you want to get into brick-and-mortar supermarkets or the major online platforms, you need a Food production licence. For this, I scouted dozens of contract processors looking for a partner. Some offered full-service contracts with labour and materials included; others did toll processing on customer-supplied materials; some provided labour only, with you supplying the materials; still others insisted on bundling a run of 50,000 or more printed packaging bags; and a few simply could not be bothered with such small margins. Even when a processor was willing to work with you, you had to watch out that they were not eyeing up your customer list.
Having tried everything, I came to believe that in the early stages, a labour-only contract with small batches and frequent production runs is the more sensible approach. You keep control of your raw materials, the product stays fresh, and your stock turnover rate looks healthier.
Tied to processing is product design. Before you release a finished item, you must put serious work into every front-end step. When I was developing a trial batch of Hollow-dried noodles, I set up the processing point in Wubu. The flour and the salt were shipped in from Inner Mongolia and Qinghai respectively, and once finished, the noodles were sent back to me. Round-trip logistics alone accounted for 30 per cent of the cost.
To keep the unit price down, I set the noodle specification at the minimum weight of 200 grams, registered a 200-gram barcode and printed 10,000 sheets of wrapping paper. Even so, the cost per pack came close to 6 yuan. Retailing at 10 yuan was clearly not viable; at 8 yuan, the channel would not touch it. In the end, the only fix was to put two 200-gram packs into a smart presentation box, register a box barcode, and retail at 15 yuan—an emergency salvage.
Our other product, sea-red crabapple cakes, also fell into a big specification trap. At 300 grams per pack, and not even in a resealable zip bag, customers could not finish one serving and found them slippery and easy to spill in a bag. More critically, the large gram weight drove up the average order value, and the knock-on effect was poor sell-through at the point of sale. This year’s new version comes in a 108-gram zip-pack, and sales have indeed picked up.
So before developing a product, you need to think clearly about the specification, the packaging material, who you are selling to, what price you are targeting, and which channels you plan to enter—plan all of this in advance, lay it out systematically, and then make comprehensive adjustments.
We paid a lot in packaging-design tuition as well. In the beginning, we simply stuck an adhesive label on a plastic bag and started selling yellow millet. Because volumes were small, quality control was easy to maintain and customer feedback was good. But then some users said, ‘Your product is great, but the packaging looks too cheap.’ So we set about designing new packaging.
A professional designer charges 6,000 to 10,000 yuan for a single product’s design alone—far beyond what I could afford. To save money, I spent three years visiting graduation design exhibitions at universities across Inner Mongolia, looking for a suitable designer. Students charged less, but the work still fell far short of commercial standards. With no other option, I turned to the major Chinese design websites, but in the end I realised that still did not solve the fundamental problem. If a designer cannot truly absorb the local culture, the form they produce will always sit at a distance from what you want to express. Fortunately, we eventually found a Shanxi-based designer who shared our philosophy and could translate the rough-hewn simplicity of time and the beauty of food into visual form.
After all that upheaval, I came to feel that packaging design must return to the product itself. Meet the user’s needs, showcase the product’s character and culture to the fullest extent, and simply make packaging that fits your current stage and resources. Packaging design should neither be an afterthought nor be over-engineered. Once the design file on the screen is finalised, always allow time for physical sampling—because if a problem surfaces midway, there is no putting it right.
V. Sales Is Full of Subtleties
In 2020 I planned to focus on expanding offline channels. I had intended to head to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, where my main customers were based, but the pandemic made that impossible. Reluctantly, I turned to the local market instead: riding my electric scooter around every day, pulling a load of goods behind me, making the rounds of convenience stores, grain-and-oil shops, local-specialty shops and community fresh-food supermarkets. Thanks to years of prior experience in offline sales, I made good progress fairly quickly — particularly in high-end community retail outlets and local-specialty shops. My prices were noticeably higher than those of similar local shops, but the quality spoke for itself, and I soon had healthy positive cash flow.
I have also continued doing online retail. In five years of running a Weidian shop I have completed over 500 transactions with an average order value of around 100 yuan. Consumer-facing individual customers remain quite scattered, making it difficult to lift overall sales volume. The handful of business-to-business corporate clients, on the other hand, contribute a disproportionately high share of revenue. So whether online or offline, B2B or B2C — none is inherently superior to the other. You have to find the direction that fits your own resources and abilities.
The same holds for building a team: you cannot build a team just for the sake of building one. In the early days of a startup funds are tight and attracting talented partners is hard. Some tasks can be handled through outsourcing — design, photography, production, processing, warehousing, packaging, logistics — while you concentrate your energy on the two core pillars: production and sales.
In eight years of entrepreneurship I never found a truly profitable model. I have sunk close to 500,000 yuan in direct capital, and if you factor in the cost of time and labour, it probably comes close to a million. I started by investing my own savings; after three years I simply could not invest any further.
During a phase when I urgently needed to build a team and work together, I accepted a round of funding from an investor, hoping they would join as a working member of the team. In reality, their time and energy were limited, and their contribution came down mainly to financial support. For a while I felt quite let down. Looking back now, I see clearly that early-stage startups must know exactly whether what they need is capital or other kinds of resources, and whether what an investor can actually offer matches those needs. Never raise money just for the sake of raising it.
In the end it still comes down to making a genuinely competitive product. If the cash flow is strong, fundraising ceases to be urgent. I keep asking myself the same question: without raising a single extra yuan, how do I move this business forward in a way that is truly sustainable?
VI. The Turn to Ecological Agriculture
- How do you fund the inputs and expenses during the transitional phase? Would it plunge a company already mired in debt — and the personal life behind it — still deeper?
- Secondly, what specific products do the ecological food sales platforms actually need? And given what this region can offer, what product can I put forward?
- Thirdly, am I truly proficient enough in ecological growing techniques to produce crops of high quality, high yield and good market price?
Several other members of the network, too, put theory into practice and carved out distinctive niches on their farms — some weaving parent-child education into farm life, others running educational study-tour programmes. Watching them do so well that their farms gradually turned from loss to profit inspired me, and in 2020 I steeled myself to go all in on ecological agriculture — building my own independent production base and, on top of that, using the nearby Yellow River, ancient villages, and the unique landscape, landforms and folk character of the Loess Plateau to run study-tour programmes.
In 2020 I planted 4 mu of chickpeas and 1 mu of wheat on my home land. The terraced fields in the loess hilly region are scattered and steep, so seeders and harvesters can barely operate on them. It is still normal for a donkey or a mule to pull a traditional seed drill and ploughshare for sowing, and the harvest is all done by hand with a sickle. I finished sowing in the biting cold of spring wind and rain. Some of the old-timers said: “Just add a little chemical fertiliser — what’s the harm? The testing labs may not even pick it up.” I gave a helpless smile and answered in a sly tone: “Oh, their machines are sharp and accurate — they’ll catch it every time.”
In summer the magpies went wild on the chickpeas, and the wheat field was half seedlings, half weeds. I could not leave the city sales unattended, yet I could not get to hoeing the fields at home. So I finally pulled the weeds a week before harvest — three people weeding for three days. My brother-in-law even joked with a laugh: “Construction pays 200 yuan a day. Three of us, that’s 1,800 — and your field won’t even earn back the seed.” When we measured the chickpea yield, it came to 70 jin — barely enough to recover the seed cost. Fortunately the wheat wasn’t so bad: 300 jin per mu. I was already daydreaming — next year, find a flatter patch nearby, plant on a bigger scale, and surely it would be a bumper harvest. I even saved a handful of golden wheat ears as a keepsake.
Cradling that handful of ears, my thoughts drifted back to the Hetao Plain — those noodles and dough dishes, so delicious, so comforting, still lingering in memory. Back to childhood, when the fragrance of steamed twisted rolls cooked in linseed oil and fresh spring onion wafted from the stove and filled the entire cave dwelling. And to my child once asking: where do steamed buns come from, what are they made from? I answered, earnestly, that they are made from wheat grown on the land, milled into flour, kneaded and steamed into buns. But deep down I felt a sourness I could not shake.
Children today are ever more accustomed to seeking joy in the virtual worlds of electronic devices, growing further from real life, with less and less contact with nature. Looking back on my own journey, I have never once surrendered lightly to hardship or adversity, never flinched at the first sign of trouble. The farm years before my twentieth birthday planted in me a strong upward force to grow. Going up the mountain to chop wood, lowering the bucket down into the well for water — there are many truths woven into farm labour.
And this is why I want to run study-tour programmes. Let children really look — at a bunch of flowers, a cloud, a stretch of starry sky. Listen to a joyful rain falling on a spring night. Listen to a cuckoo calling in an April valley. Taste, with full attention, a chilled glutinous-millet cake they made themselves in a midsummer cave dwelling. Wind a bucket of sweet well water up from a well using a windlass. Dig up a nest of potatoes on the open plain and roast them over a fire. Dance on a haystack. Touch a 500-million-year-old stone on the plateau. Paddle and drift down the great river…
Perhaps a happy life is simply childhood lived again. Thank the Loess Plateau that has nourished my entire life, letting me return here before middle age settles in, to reclaim the beauty of childhood and pass that beauty on to the next generation.
This article was edited from Reshaping the Pastoral, a book published by Commercial Press and co-written by first-cohort members of the Northwest New Farmers’ Network.
