A Bumper Lychee Harvest—So Why Are They Still Not Cheap Online?
I. Lychees Hanging Thick on the Branches
My hometown is in Lufeng, Guangdong Province, and we have an orchard of nearly a mu (roughly 667 m²) of lychee trees. As far back as I can remember, lychees have always been grown there. The youngest tree was planted the year I was born—it’s now thirty-one years old.
In previous bumper crop years, after my parents sent packages to the four of us siblings and gave a bit to relatives, there was barely any left. Last year was a lean crop year; there weren’t many fruits on the trees, just enough for our own table. The two boxes they’d normally send me had shrunk to a single small box. This year is a bumper crop year—and the biggest in decades. Our lychees have yielded abundantly, so my husband An Tian and I decided to go home and be fruit farmers for a few days.
An Tian and I returned to our family orchard in late June. Though we’d braced ourselves mentally, it was only when we arrived on the spot that we truly felt the abundance—some branches had been weighed down to the ground, and even the small lateral branches sprouting from the trunks were laden with fruit. The lychees high up had already turned a brilliant red; in the shadier spots, the fruit still carried a touch of green.
Because our lychees are left to grow wild, with no added fertiliser, the fruits are smaller than conventionally grown ones and can’t fetch much at the local market. When the lychees first appeared, they were selling for about 10 yuan per jin (500 g) at the market; my mum sold hers for 8 yuan a jin to move stock quickly. By the time a glut hit the market, no one would even pay 5.5 yuan a jin for ours. For customers, big and cheap is king—they don’t care a jot whether you spray pesticides or not.
On top of that, we don’t have a centralised collection point here like they do in Maoming, and with such small quantities, it’s hard to contract out to suppliers. If you want to earn more, your only option is to find buyers online.
Fortunately, when An Tian and I went to Longyan in Fujian last October to run our own farm, we opened a WeChat mini-shop to sell produce and gradually built a WeChat group to share our daily life. So two days before heading home, we mentioned in the group that we had lychees to sell, and within no time three or four friends placed orders—at least that way we’d be busy dispatching on day one.
An Tian took some photos of the lychees in the orchard for our mini-shop product listings, and continued hawking them on WeChat Moments and in the group. We had no idea how many people would buy, so we figured sell what we can, earn what we can, which meant we didn’t price them by ecological cultivation standards. In the end we settled on 54 yuan for 3 jin (1.5 kg) and 88 yuan for 5 jin (2.5 kg).
When setting the prices, we’d referred to lychee prices at supermarkets in Fuzhou—about 16 yuan per jin (500 g). Since An Tian and I had been working in Fuzhou before our trip home, we figured our friends there were the most likely buyers. But we’d underestimated the cost of shipping and hadn’t considered the difference in rates between in-province and out-of-province deliveries. And it was precisely for this reason that we ran into considerable trouble on our first delivery.
II. Shipping Costs More Than the Lychees
Our first shipment was, without experience, a bit of a mad scramble. We had no cardboard boxes, no polystyrene boxes—just trees heavy with lychees. Lychees are notoriously difficult to keep fresh; picked without any treatment, at that day’s temperature, the skins turn black and dry by the next day. Customers might assume they’d gone bad and file complaints or request refunds. So we decided on the spot to take them straight to the SF Express depot and have them pack—surely they’d have everything we needed sorted.
Conghua, in Guangzhou, where we once did a work placement at a farm, is one of China’s main lychee-growing regions, so during harvest there is a dedicated SF Express service point there for shipping lychees, and rates are somewhat lower. But our village is full of small-scale growers and smallholders, with only a regular SF Express outlet. When we got there, quite a few people were already queuing, yet there was just one staff member, far too busy to answer anyone’s questions. It was all rather chaotic.
As I was asking about polystyrene boxes, the auntie in the neighbouring shop piped up first: “We sell polystyrene boxes too, you know—what size do you need?” With so many growers shipping in these past few days, her polystyrene boxes and ice packs had been flying off the shelves.
Once everything was packed, the courier handed us a sticker to place our order so he could keep processing the others. An Tian scanned the code to place the order, and said with a hint of disbelief: “It’s 36 yuan to ship to Fuzhou!”
“We’re selling for 54, and shipping alone is 36—and that’s even at the Standard Express rate,” An Tian muttered, still running the numbers in his head. Because we were busy packing and things were a little disorganised, his thinking was muddled too—he’d mistakenly assumed our 5-jin box was only a 3-jin one.
My head was spinning. There were so many people, and Mum was waiting beside us. She couldn’t understand why we still hadn’t placed the order or why it was taking so long—she couldn’t follow Mandarin. Everything felt a bit jumbled, but we couldn’t think of any other way. Even if we weren’t going to make any profit, we simply had to send them out.
On the way home, my mind cleared up a little, and I finally worked out that what we were shipping was actually the 5-jin box, priced at 88 yuan. With 36 yuan for shipping to Fujian and 5 yuan for the ice pack and box, we’d have just 47 yuan left. If it were a further destination, shipping would cost even more—for example, a Standard Express 5-jin box to Shandong runs 54 yuan. At that rate, courier and packaging costs eat up roughly two-thirds of the revenue from a single lychee order.
By then, our mini-shop had taken over a dozen orders, going to Sichuan, Shandong, and Fujian. With no way to solve the shipping-cost problem, that evening we had no choice but to split the product listing into two prices—one for in-province, one for out-of-province. In-province stayed at 54 yuan for 3 jin (1.5 kg) and 88 yuan for 5 jin (2.5 kg); for out-of-province we bumped it up slightly to 68 yuan for 3 jin and 108 yuan for 5 jin.
Many customers couldn’t understand why lychees were still so expensive in what was clearly a bumper crop year. But work out the shipping costs from a fruit farmer’s perspective, and the answer becomes immediately clear.
Later, we switched to JD Logistics for shipping. The base rates were no different from SF Express, but we could buy lots of vouchers, making it slightly cheaper overall in the end. At the close of it all, we did the sums: we sold 51 orders in total, earning 4,503 yuan, while shipping and packaging cost 1,526 yuan. Courier and packaging fees ultimately accounted for around a third of total revenue. But this figure does not include the labour costs of picking, sorting, and packing that come with courier shipping.
III. Fruit Farmers Racing Against Time
This was, in truth, the thing I worried about most when shipping by courier. Looking at all those fruits on the trees, An Tian wanted to sell as many as possible, as quickly as he could. But for me, how many fruits sold wasn’t the priority—I was far more worried that customers would open a box and find rotten lychees. I grew up on these lychees; they’re delicious, and I don’t want them to turn into a soggy mess in someone else’s hands. I want them to taste just as good.
Keeping lychees fresh means that as fruit farmers, we have to race every second during picking and packing. They need to be picked when it’s cool, so the lower temperature helps preserve freshness. That means heading into the orchard first thing every morning. They also must not be wet when picked, or they’ll spoil quickly once sealed in a polystyrene box. I remember one night it rained—quite heavily. Halfway through the night, I heard the pounding rain and had a dreadful feeling. By the time I reached the orchard just after six the next morning, the lychees were still dripping wet. Every plan fell apart, and we simply had to wait for the sun to come out and dry them off before we could pick.
The packing that follows picking really tests one’s hand speed too. An Tian and I could manage about twenty boxes a day between us. We head out to pick at seven in the morning and are back around ten. Once back, we sort through the fruit: any with insect damage gets removed, any that look less than perfect is pulled, and leaves and twigs are trimmed back a little—but a few are left on, as that helps preserve freshness. By midday we’ve sorted through most of the haul. We eat lunch and go back to sorting; every lychee that goes into a box gets at least a quick glance, which is time-consuming. Before three in the afternoon, the packing is done and we deliver the boxes to the main courier depot, so the lychees can make the earliest dispatch run.
The days flew by in a flash. Once we were back in Longyan, Fujian, Guangdong had several more rainstorms in quick succession. I imagine that in every lychee grove across this land, there are fruit farmers just like us, threading their way between the green and the red, doing everything they can to beat the clock and get the fruit in. I thought again of Mum’s anxious face as she waited beside us during that very first shipment. Shipping is genuinely expensive, but there’s nothing we can change about that. All we can do is race against time to keep the lychees fresh before they go out. As small fruit farmers, that’s simply the best we can manage.
Images: all taken by the author unless otherwise noted
Edited by: Yuyang