Counter-Intuitive Natural Farming

In 2019, Sister Yanping set aside a little over 50 mu of this land to begin trialling ecological farming. Just over forty mu is given over to Wogan mandarins, another ten-odd mu to Emperor Mandarins, and at the highest point of the orchard there are still dozens of lychee trees that were growing there before the lease was taken out. Over the years, she has interplanted lychee, longan, mango and wampee between the rows of fruit trees that were not thriving, and grows cassava and short-cycle grains and vegetables in the rows – corn, soybeans, sorghum, millet, mung beans, yard-long beans, winter melon, pumpkin, cucumber, tomato and luffa.

I have always lived in northern China. Before coming to the orchard, I had no idea what citrus trees looked like or when they flowered and bore fruit, and it took me a long time on the farm before I began to form any real concept of it. What exactly is the difference between “ecological farming” and “conventional farming”? It took me another spell of careful observation before I realised just how counter-“common sense” so many of Sister Yanping’s practices actually are.

The first is leaving fruit on the tree.

In a conventional orchard, for fear of frost damage, the harvest is typically completed within a few days to a fortnight at most, with the fruit sold in one bulk transaction to fruit merchants and then stored in cold rooms for ongoing sales. Sister Yanping’s practice of leaving fruit on the tree works the other way: she keeps ripe fruit on the branches, extending both the picking season and the selling season. Emperor Mandarins stretch from November through to January of the following year, while Wogan mandarins go on from December all the way to late April or even May.

Unlike a conventional orchard, which strips every tree of its fruit in a single pass, Sister Yanping’s orchard picks the highest and ripest fruit first, then works through round after round – each tree going through multiple harvests.

Leaving fruit on the tree relates both to the keeping qualities of Emperor Mandarins and Wogan mandarins themselves – they are hardy and resist rotting – and is a deliberate choice on Sister Yanping’s part. She believes it allows people to enjoy fresh fruit over a longer period, rather than fruit held and treated in cold storage, and to savour different flavour profiles at different times.

By the time we arrived at the orchard at the end of March, the Emperor Mandarins had long since finished their harvest and sales, but thankfully the Wogan mandarins were still in peak season. Right through to the end of April, we had Wogan mandarins picked fresh from the tree every single day.

Each fruit-selling season, Sister Yanping has to hire local people to help. In the beginning, these workers knew nothing of the ecological approach to growing and selling. It took a long process of mutual adjustment before both sides developed an easy rapport, and it is only through that rapport that they can work in ways that minimise harm to the fruit and the trees.

Leaving fruit on the tree may add to the workload, but it does a far better job of preserving fruit quality. The fruit picked last is generally the lowest – the ones tucked away among the grass at the bottom of the canopy. The weeds in the orchard provide those lower fruit with a relatively constant temperature and humidity, so the very last fruit picked tastes just as perfect as the first.

Leaving fruit on the tree is also tied to how Sister Yanping’s family sells. They have built up a fairly stable distribution network: part of the fruit is sold through ecological produce platforms, part is promoted and distributed personally by fellow ecological farmers, and part goes to a loyal base of consumers who value ecological produce – people she has gathered over the years through both online and offline channels. These channels generate a steady but modest volume, and everything is dispatched straight from the orchard to the buyer.

This relatively small, steady volume puts no real strain on manpower. The orchard can set its own rhythm for the whole sequence of picking, sorting, boxing, packing, printing and affixing shipping labels, and delivering parcels to the courier collection point. Generally, fruit picked in the morning is dispatched the same day, or picked in the afternoon and dispatched the next – with no worry about fruit sitting around too long and rotting. When prolonged rain strikes, buyers are notified and both picking and dispatch are put off.

II. Counter-Intuitive Farming: Leaving the Grass

The second intriguing concept is “leaving the grass” – allowing weeds to grow and provide ground cover so long as they do not hinder the fruit trees.

Fresh from arriving, I was baffled by the orchard, which was thick with weeds waist-high and deeper. The lesson passed down from my parents’ generation was that weeds must always be removed, for they rob the crops of nutrients. Weeding was the farm chore I did most as a child – pulling them up root and all, then carting them off the field so they could not come back to life at the next rain.

During the fruit-picking, I discovered the benefit of leaving the grass: it creates a constant-temperature, constant-humidity micro-environment. Moreover, in prolonged dry spells the soil beneath a grass-covered orchard stays far moister than bare earth. So do weeds really compete with crops for nutrients? Looking purely at nutrient uptake, I suspect they do. But from the standpoint of soil health, the positive effects of leaving the grass should outweigh that competition.

I found theoretical backing for this point later, when reading Agricultural Soil Science by the soil scientist Hou Guangjiong. Hou argued that soil is a quasi-organism with a metabolism resembling that of a living creature. At its essence, soil is an organic–inorganic–microbial–enzymatic complex colloid capable of remarkable physiological functions – not merely a mixture of mineral sand and fine silt, nor simply a carrier of nutrient elements such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Soil has two vital physiological functions: infiltration capacity and rewetting capacity, and physiological coordination with plants; both are deeply influenced by climate.

Put simply, leaving the grass creates a microclimate around the fruit trees to a depth of roughly one metre in which water, heat and air remain relatively stable. This microclimate has a profound bearing on the soil’s infiltration and rewetting capacity. In dry spells, good rewetting function allows plant roots to draw water and nutrients from deep within the soil; in heavy rain, it helps the soil absorb water more effectively, preventing surface runoff that scours the earth and carries nutrients away.

But leaving the grass does not mean letting it run wild unchecked – growth and height must be managed at the right times. The choice of when to cut the grass depends on the growth cycle of the fruit trees or crops. For instance, when the trees are sending out tender new shoots and leaves is not the time to mow, for the grass at that stage serves as a decoy for pests and diseases, drawing them away from the trees. Once the grass is cut, those pests and diseases move onto the trees to feed on the young shoots and leaves.

There are several methods of grass management, mainly trampling with the feet and cutting with a sickle. When sowing crops, a mower is used to clear a strip of ground for planting so the seeds can germinate unimpeded.

Another role the grass plays is creating a micro-environment conducive to microbial decomposition of organic matter – a phenomenon Sister Yanping asked us to keep an eye on during the picking season. Fruit too imperfect to sell is generally dropped on the ground beneath the trees, a practice of returning it to the soil as natural compost. Within days of being dropped, a layer of white fuzz already coats the fruit; that fuzz is in fact beneficial microorganisms. A little more time, and the fruit ferments and rots until it is absorbed into the earth.

One telling observation: after the harvest season ended in early May and we moved in to clear the undergrowth, finding a fallen fruit to eat beneath the trees had become almost impossible.

III. Counter-Intuitive Farming: Composting

Making compost and fermented plant extract to improve soil quality, manage pests and diseases, and enhance the flavour of crops is a widely endorsed practice among fellow ecological farmers.

Sister Yanping devoted a great deal of effort to these tasks in her first few years, and large buckets of fermented plant extract and compost stations from those early days still stand at the upper reaches of the orchard – the compost stations are still in use today – but her enthusiasm for them has waned considerably over the past two years. She feels that once labour and material costs are factored in, centralised composting is not cheap, and decentralised composting is actually the better option – for instance, returning unsellable fruit to the soil beneath the trees on the spot, or cutting grass and letting it fall as mulch where it was cut.

Sister Yanping’s ideal is to turn the entire orchard into a living composting ground. As I understand it, this means two things: first, leave the grass; second, cultivate a healthy ecosystem that draws in soil microorganisms and all manner of small creatures, so that organic matter is continuously broken down and fermented.

These three counter-intuitive farming methods have already upended my assumptions. But truly working in the orchard day after day, I found that while the pastoral vision of natural, ecological, organic living is undeniably beautiful, it comes at an enormous cost in effort. Keeping Natural Farming going conceals a great deal of extra, invisible, hidden labour.

In Hundred-Fruit Orchard Internship Notes (Part II), to be published next week, I will walk through each of these hidden costs in detail.

Foodthink Author

Dawang

An intern in the second phase of Foodthink’s Lianhe Programme, dreaming of working and living on the land, still searching for soil in which a seed can take root.