Nine Years Back Home, and I’m Only Just Beginning to Find My Footing
I. Loess Plateau Cuisine That Shaped My Childhood
Born in the 1980s, I grew up in the mountainous folds of the Loess Plateau. I have always loved the hills, the vast plateau, and the wild freedom of roaming through slopes awash with wildflowers.
My hometown lies where the borders of Shanxi, Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia meet. As far as the eye can see, the plateau is quilted with tiered terraces. Settlements cling to the slopes, built to follow the land’s natural contours using only the region’s stone and loess.
My father was both a farmer and a stonemason. He often travelled to neighbouring villages in Shanxi to craft stone grinding mills and rollers, or to build cave dwellings for local families. The fronts of these dwellings were cut from blue-grey stone or yellow rock, adorned with intricate patterns struck out with a chisel. To me, they were the most beautiful sights in the world. Whenever a dwelling was completed, the air would ring with firecrackers, and we children would push through the crowds of adults, eager to snatch the white flour steamed buns marked with a festive red dot that the hosts handed out.
Much of my childhood is tied to food. In our part of the world, the diet revolved around coarse grains: oats, buckwheat, broomcorn millet, and sticky cakes made from yellow millet. Vegetables were a mere supplement, grown in small patches within the cave-dwelling courtyards during the summer and autumn months.
For the rest of the year, potatoes were our staple. We called them *shanyao dan*. My mother knew how to slice, dice, cube, shred or shape them into balls, constantly finding new ways to prepare them for the family. As a child, my biggest dread was descending into the cellar to fetch them, terrified of the spiders, centipedes, millipedes and even frogs that lurked in the dark.
After the first spring rains, we would head into the hills to forage for wild ground lichens. In summer, we gathered wild *zhameng* blossoms, tossing them in hot flaxseed oil, or prepared chilled soybean sprouts and bitter greens—a truly divine combination. We’d also boil broad beans and snow peas, but nothing beat chilled yellow millet cakes or a bowl of tangy broomcorn millet porridge to cool us down. Autumn meant pushing a wooden wheelbarrow into the hills and gullies to harvest seabuckthorn berries. Winter called for the yellow millet buns and mountain hawthorns, left to freeze naturally in large earthen jars.
These rhythms of seasonal life have always warmed and sustained me.
II. How Chemical Agriculture Made Me Despise Myself
Every time I pulled on my rubber gloves and carefully unscrewed the lids of those large plastic drums filled with thick green, red, and blue seed treatments, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the demons of legend—gnarled claws, jagged fangs, crimson faces and hair—were about to slither out of the drum and throw themselves over me. The constant exposure soon took its toll: a maddeningly itchy rash broke out on the back of my calves.
III. Food Helped Me Find My Way Again
IV. The 81 Tribulations of Entrepreneurship
Product selection was the key in those early days. My hometown lies in a dryland farming region with a wide variety of staple crops. Initially, I put everything up for sale: oat grain, buckwheat, glutinous millet, broomcorn millet, flaxseed oil, millet vinegar, pea flour, Hetao wheat flour, and sea buckthorn juice. Through all that hustling, each item sold modestly, but none achieved significant volume. As raw agricultural products, they are heavy and bulky. The barrier to entry is low, making it difficult to differentiate them from competitors, and profit margins remain thin.
When it comes to the processing stage, you also need to consider whether heavy investment in hardware is necessary at this early phase. Initially, we shelled our oat kernels and millet at a village mill, but the mixture was plagued with stones and grit that were hard to remove. I bought a grain cleaning machine online for 2,000 RMB, but it failed to meet basic screening standards and ultimately gathered dust as scrap metal. Paradoxically, taking the grain to a medium-sized processing plant in the county town cost far less and solved the problem outright.
If you want to get into offline supermarkets or major online platforms, you’ll also need a food production licence. This led me to visit numerous contract manufacturers seeking partnerships. Some offered full-service processing (labour and materials included), others worked on a toll-processing basis, some handled labour only without supplying materials, and others demanded you commit to printing at least 50,000 packaging bags upfront. Still others simply dismissed the margins as too thin. Even when a factory is willing to take the order, keep a watchful eye out—they might be after your customer list.
Drawing from these experiences, during the startup phase, it’s generally better to supply your own raw materials and opt for small-batch, frequent production runs. This way, you control ingredient quality, keep products fresh, and maintain a healthier inventory turnover rate.
Processing goes hand in hand with product design. Before anything leaves the factory, you need to put serious effort into mastering every upstream step. When I first tested a hollow dried noodle, I set up production in Wubao, sourcing flour from Inner Mongolia and salt from Qinghai. Once finished, the goods were shipped back to me. The round-trip logistics alone ate up 30% of the cost.
To keep the unit price down, I set the noodle pack size to the minimum of 200g, registered a barcode for it, and printed 10,000 wrapper sheets. Even so, the cost came out to nearly 6 RMB. Selling at 10 RMB retail was clearly unworkable, but at 8 RMB, distributors refused to stock it. I had no choice but to bundle two 200g packs into a smart paper box, register a new barcode for the box, and retail it at 15 RMB—a last-ditch fix.
Another of our products, a hawthorn fruit pastry, fell into the same packaging-size trap. At 300g per snack pack, and without a resealable zip lock, customers couldn’t finish it in one sitting, and it easily spilled out of bags. Even worse, the larger weight drove up the average transaction value, which triggered a ripple effect: poor sell-through at retail. This year’s revised version switched to a 108g resealable pouch, and sales predictably picked up.
Therefore, before developing any product, you need to have a clear plan: what pack sizes to use, what materials for the packaging, who your target customers are, what price point you’re aiming for, and which sales channels you intend to enter. Map it all out systematically in advance, then make holistic adjustments.
We’ve also learned expensive lessons when it comes to packaging design. At first, we simply slapped a self-adhesive label on a plastic bag and started selling yellow millet. With small volumes, quality control was straightforward, and early feedback was positive. Eventually, however, customers began telling us the product was good, but the packaging looked too cheap. So we set about designing a new look.
But professional designers charged 6,000 to 10,000 RMB for a single product, which was completely out of reach. To save money, I spent three years attending graduate design exhibitions at universities across Inner Mongolia, hunting for a suitable designer. Students charged less, but their work was still worlds apart from commercial standards. Out of options, I turned to major domestic design freelance platforms, only to realise that didn’t solve the core issue either. If a designer can’t truly grasp your local culture, their visuals will always feel disconnected from what you’re trying to communicate. Fortunately, we eventually connected with a designer from Shanxi. Our philosophies aligned, and they managed to translate the rustic charm of the land and the inherent beauty of the food into compelling visual elements.
After all that trial and error, I’ve come to believe packaging design must always circle back to the product itself. It should address user needs, highlight the product’s features and cultural heritage as much as possible, and simply match the stage and capabilities you’re at right now. Don’t cut corners, but don’t overreach either. And once a digital mock-up is ready, always leave ample time for physical proofing. If you need tweaks later, rushing it will leave you with no way to fix it.
Five. The Many Nuances of Sales
I also persisted with online retail. Over five years of operating a Weidian store, I completed just over five hundred transactions, with an average order value of around 100 yuan. B2C individual customers remained quite fragmented, making it difficult to scale transaction volumes. By contrast, although I had only a handful of B2B corporate clients, they accounted for a disproportionately high share of sales. Ultimately, whether online or offline, or B2B versus B2C, no single model is inherently superior. The key is to align your approach with your own resources and capabilities to find a path that truly suits you.
Building a team follows the same logic: you shouldn’t assemble one merely for the sake of having a team. In the early stages of a startup, capital is tight and attracting top talent is challenging. Certain functions can be handled through outsourcing partnerships—such as design, photography, production, processing, warehousing, packaging, and logistics—allowing you to concentrate your efforts on mastering the most critical aspects: production and sales.
After eight years in business, I still hadn’t cracked a reliable profit model. My direct financial investment had approached 500,000 yuan; factoring in time and labour costs, the true cost was likely closer to a million. I had initially funded everything from my own savings, but after three years, I simply couldn’t keep pouring money in.
At a time when I urgently needed collaborators to build out the team, I accepted an investment, hoping the investor would step in as an active team member. In practice, however, their time and energy were limited, and the contribution was almost entirely financial. I felt rather let down. In hindsight, startups must be clear about whether they genuinely need capital or other strategic resources, and whether those needs match what the investor can realistically provide. Chasing funding for funding’s sake is a pitfall to avoid.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to creating a genuinely competitive product. If the business generates strong cash flow, external funding ceases to be an urgent priority. I have asked myself time and again: how can I sustainably grow this venture without relying on outside investment?
VI. Transitioning to Ecological Agriculture
- How would I fund the investments and cover the costs during the transition? Would this push a company already mired in debt, and my personal life, into even deeper trouble?
- Secondly, what exactly do the various ecological produce sales platforms need in terms of individual products? And considering the local conditions, what standalone product could I realistically offer?
- Thirdly, was I truly proficient in ecological farming techniques? Could I produce crops that were both high in quality and yield, yet still command a good price?
Several network members have successfully bridged theory and practice, cultivating distinct specialties at their own farms. Some have woven parent-and-child education into their farm life, while others have developed educational field trips. Seeing them thrive and steer their operations from loss to profitability inspired me. By 2020, I had made my decision to turn to ecological agriculture: establishing an independent production base of my own, and drawing on the unique topography and local culture surrounding the Yellow River, ancient villages, and Loess Plateau to launch educational farm visits.
In 2020, I planted four mu of chickpeas and one mu of wheat on my home soil. The terraced fields in this loess hilly region are scattered and steeply sloped, leaving little room for mechanised seeders and harvesters. The traditional method remains: donkeys and mules pulling seed drills and ploughs, with crops reaped by hand using sickles. I finished sowing through the chilly spring winds and rain. Some fellow villagers remarked, ‘It wouldn’t hurt to sprinkle a little chemical fertilizer; the testing agencies probably won’t catch it.’ I smiled wryly and replied with a teasing tone, ‘Their equipment is highly sensitive and accurate; they’ll pick it up.’
The magpies devoured the chickpeas all summer, and the wheat patch ended up half seedlings, half weeds. I couldn’t leave my city sales untouched, and the village fields went unweeded until a week before harvest. Three of us spent three days pulling weeds by hand. My brother-in-law smiled as we worked: ‘At a construction site, you’d earn 200 yuan a day; that’s 1,800 yuan for the three of us over three days. But this land won’t even recoup the cost of the seeds.’ The final yield of chickpeas was just 35 kilograms – barely enough to cover the seed cost. Fortunately, the wheat held up better, yielding around 150 kilograms per mu. Dreaming of locating a flatter area nearby for wider planting next year and hoping for a bumper harvest, I carefully saved a bunch of golden wheat ears as a keepsake.
Clutching that handful of ears, memories surfaced of the comforting wheat-based dishes from the Hetao Plain, and the scent of fresh scallion steamed buns brushed with sesame oil that once filled our cave dwelling from the stove. I also remembered my child asking me where steamed buns come from and what they are made of. I answered earnestly that wheat from the earth is ground into flour and steamed into buns, but the explanation left a heavy, uneasy feeling in my chest.
Today’s children are increasingly accustomed to finding joy in the virtual worlds of screens, drifting further from tangible life and rarely stepping into nature. Looking back on my own path, I have never shied away from hardship or retreated at the first sign of difficulty. The years I spent on a farm before turning twenty endowed me with a resilient, upward drive. Chopping firewood on the hills, hauling water from the well – traditional farming tasks are rich with quiet wisdom.
This is exactly why I embarked on these educational farm visits. I want to give children the space to really look at a bunch of wildflowers, a single cloud, a vast starry sky; to listen to the patter of welcomed rain on a spring night, and the cry of cuckoos in April valleys; to mindfully taste chilled millet cakes they made themselves inside a cave dwelling in midsummer; to haul up a bucket of sweet well water using a windlass; to dig a nest of potatoes from the earth and roast them in the open; to dance on top of a haystack; to trace the surface of a five-hundred-million-year-old stone on the plateau; to take up oars and drift down a wide river…
Perhaps a happy life is simply a repetition of childhood. I am deeply grateful to the Loess Plateau that has nourished me for a lifetime, allowing me, before reaching middle age, to return here, rediscover the beauty of my youth, and pass that same beauty on to the next generation.
This article is adapted from *Reshaping the Countryside*, published by The Commercial Press, and was co-authored by the first cohort of participants in the ‘Northwest New Farmers Network’.
