What Does an Agronomy Workshop That Doesn’t Sell Pesticides and Fertilisers Look Like?
On 12 April, a week after Grain Rain, several showers fell across eastern Sichuan, easing the drought that had persisted from the Spring Festival through March. The rice seedlings raised in the fields were nearing the time for transplanting.
That afternoon, Senior Agronomist Yuan Yong and his colleagues rushed from Jianyang City to Zhaizi Village to check on the seedlings in their partner plots and run a rice cultivation workshop for local smallholders.
“I have a question I am curious about — why did the three of you choose to come to our training today?” Yuan Yong asked the handful of farmers who had turned up. An elderly man surnamed Jiang broke the silence: “Everyone fancies trying their hand at green produce these days.”
No pesticide or herbicide, no ploughing before transplanting, straw mulching after transplanting — what villagers call “green growing” is the no-till cover ecological rice cultivation technique Yuan Yong has been promoting since 2010.
“Once the straw mulching is done, all you have left for field management is mahjong.” Yuan Yong’s Sichuan-style humour broke the room’s solemnity and stirred my curiosity: would farmers really accept a way of planting so unlike tradition? After all these years, how had they managed to get the technique to take root in the various counties and cities across Sichuan?
And so I came to Zhaizi Village to observe Yuan Yong running a training session for the villagers. The aunties and uncles dotted sparsely across the farmhouse yard responded to his warm-up talk with silence. But as the explanation unfolded, their discussion grew lively.
I. What Is No-Till Cover?
Compared with conventional farming, the no-till cover method improves crop health and drought resilience, saves labour, and reduces the need for external inputs such as pesticides and chemical fertilisers. Yuan Yong sketched a diagram on a blank sheet of paper, talking through each step of field management as he drew.
It starts with preparing the field. The aim is to level the surface so the seedlings take hold and survive well after transplanting. The local custom has long been to deep-plough and fine-harrow the soil. But Yuan Yong advises against it.
Ploughing does loosen the soil and improve aeration, yet it also disrupts soil structure and the microbial life within. Combined with years of pesticide and chemical fertiliser use, deep ploughing and fine harrowing make soil compaction even worse. Unhealthy soil loses its resilience against extreme weather and disease — “with soil like that, you can hardly avoid reaching for pesticides.” That is why, over the years, he has championed a no-till planting strategy.
A key step in field preparation is “laying out channels” — cutting a channel every 5 chi across the levelled field to allow water in and out. Compared with the traditional flooded cultivation method, timely irrigation and drainage ensure the soil absorbs the right amount of moisture rather than too much.
Each channel is about 25 cm wide — just a little wider than a hoe — and roughly half a hoe-deep. A perimeter channel is also cut around the field’s edge, linking up with the internal channel-bed drains. The raised planting beds between the channels are where the rice goes. The soil excavated for the channels is spread over the adjacent beds. “That is all there is to preparing the field.”
Compared with conventional rice planting, the extra labour in the no-till cover method goes into laying out the channels, but the ploughing work during field preparation is eliminated entirely. Provided the straw mulch is properly applied, weeding is unnecessary too, and once the channel layout is completed in the first year, it requires no further effort.
The Central Sichuan Hills are a rice–rapeseed rotation area, and every year the rapeseed oil cake left over after pressing is a natural fertiliser for the paddy fields. Once the rapeseed oil cake is spread as basal fertiliser, the main event follows — flooding the field and transplanting the seedlings.
The standing water within each raised bed must not exceed 1 cm. Once the water has seeped slowly into the soil, transplanting can begin. Yuan Yong had a vivid way of describing the right soil moisture for transplanting: “Wait until there is no water film left on the raised beds and only a little water pooled in the low spots — that is when you transplant.”
The planting pattern matters too. Unlike the traditional approach of several rows per bed with one seedling per hill, Yuan Yong recommends just four rows per raised bed, three seedlings per hill, arranged in equilateral triangles with about 10 cm between plants, continuing in the same pattern; the row spacing between hills is also 10 cm.
“It looks thin, but it is not thin at all.” At that point Uncle Zhong, just back from his mahjong session, cut in to reassure his neighbours. Yuan Yong explained that this spacing gives better air circulation and light penetration, promotes stronger tillering in the rice, and uses nearly 50 per cent less seed than conventional transplanting — especially suited to areas with limited sunshine.
After transplanting, only the straw mulching step remains. The straw comes from the rapeseed husks left after harvesting the pods for oil. Yuan Yong listed the many benefits — weed suppression, improved nutrient availability, higher soil temperature, and moisture retention. In extreme drought, the soil holds better moisture and withstands the stress. “The whole process is just that simple.”
“This method should be especially well suited to dry fields.”
“Exactly — just use the existing channel layout as it is.”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes — double-cropping fields are especially well suited.”
Everyone chimed in, describing the type of their own plot and debating whether the method would work for them. Once the room warmed up, Yuan Yong invited Uncle Zhong to share his experience.
The septuagenarian is in his second year of working with Yuan Yong. Besides insisting that every step must be followed exactly, he repeatedly urged everyone to cut back on chemical fertiliser and herbicide. “I know it makes you anxious when you see grass coming up, but for goodness” sake do not spray herbicide. If you miss the mark even slightly, it does harm to both the seedlings and the growing crops.”
In Yuan Yong’s view, this was only a temporary setback. If the right plot is selected and the method is followed year after year, both soil quality and yield will improve. This is an outcome verified over more than a decade of promotion work. Among the farmers Yuan Yong has partnered with in other villages, the highest recorded yield has exceeded 1,300 jin per mu. “They used old heirloom varieties they had saved their own seed from — even the experts from the Academy of Agricultural Sciences who came to assess the yield could hardly believe it, and it was a drought year at that.”
So when asked whether he still had confidence, Uncle Zhong shot back, “How could I possibly lack confidence?” This year he has found a new plot to try the no-till cover method on.
After more than an hour of listening, Grandpa Jiang was most convinced by the health philosophy and the labour-saving practicalities of the technique. He decided to set aside two fen of land to give it a try. “I have gained experience this year; next year I will put seven or eight fen under it.”
II. A Different Approach to Outreach
Yuan Yong says the outreach model here is quite different from what “Home Action” has used in the past. Compared with going door to door to persuade individual smallholders, working through the village collective brings clear advantages: communication is cheaper, efficiency is higher, and if the Village Party Secretary can be convinced, the technique can be adopted on a large scale.
Secretary Jiang, born in the 1980s, has been a key figure in this effort. He first met Yuan Yong at a technology workshop where he was learning about the plastic film mulching technique for high-yield rice. Two years ago, looking to revitalise the village’s collective economy, Secretary Jiang partnered with the Chengdu-based Home Action and adopted the no-till cover ecological cultivation method.
“Before we came, he had yet to think in terms of going ecological. But he often attended conferences elsewhere, and on returning, he would observe that the model villages doing well all shared one trait — they were all going ecological,” summarised Hu Xiaoping, director of Home Action in Chengdu.
Before 2022, Secretary Jiang had already run a year of collective farming. “But he took a terrible loss because he spent far too much on inputs,” Yuan Yong recalled. The key to ecological farming lies in reducing external inputs, not simply replacing chemical fertilisers and pesticides with organic inputs.
That October, the one and a half mu of ecological wheat grown in their joint trial made an immediate splash. With no pesticides or chemical fertilisers, using the same no-till cover method, the yield per mu reached 1,200 jin — 400 jin more than local conventional wheat — and pests and diseases were fewer. That year, Secretary Jiang also mustered the courage to go without pesticides on several hundred mu of conventional collective wheat, and the yield turned out well.
The ecological wheat trial built direct trust between the two parties. The following year, the village collective expanded the area under ecological wheat, and the rapeseed fields adopted the technique too. This year, the collective’s paddy fields have begun using the no-till cover method.
In the rice–rapeseed rotation, the rapeseed provides the paddy with natural fertiliser and mulch. This saves labour and cuts input costs; production costs are kept tightly under control, pests and diseases are minimal, and the results have met the expectations Secretary Jiang set when he first partnered with Home Action.
Now Secretary Jiang’s concern has shifted to sales. “Before, I worried about whether we could grow it; now I worry about whether we can sell it.”
In response, Yuan Yong and his colleagues have been encouraging him to adopt graded product marketing. On their advice, Secretary Jiang set up a WeChat group to bring together existing and potential consumers of ecological produce. At each key milestone in the farming calendar, he shares crop updates and quality-test results in the group.
Now in his third year of the ecological transition, Secretary Jiang still grapples with doubts about ecological produce, and during sales he faces customers’ scepticism: “It costs a few yuan more than the usual stuff — what exactly is the benefit?”
Although Secretary Jiang has yet to find the words to convince his customers, the soil improvements from ecological growing are plain to see and touch. After two years of working together, he has embraced Yuan Yong’s team’s ecological philosophy: “Through several years of straw return to field, the soil’s microbial life has established a virtuous cycle — it is perfectly sufficient now.”
He has taken to using this line to open his training sessions.
III. Technology in Service of Life
To change the thinking of individual smallholder farmers is no easy feat.
Before the workshop began, Yuan Yong followed Secretary Jiang out to the collective land to check on the seedling beds. These plots are tended by villagers hired by the collective, and in some of them the rice seedlings were struggling. Upon asking, they learned that a villager had recently applied an extra round of liquid manure, causing fertiliser scorch on the seedlings.
“These seedlings only need a dose of dilute liquid manure a week in advance, followed by some plain water, and they will be perfectly fine,” Yuan Yong’s colleague remarked with a sigh, adding that in Shuanghe Village, where they have been working for over a decade, such problems no longer arise — the villagers there have thoroughly mastered the technique.
Why has such a transformation been possible in Shuanghe Village? I asked Yuan Yong.
He told me it was the first village where they had promoted the no-till cover method. Come to think of it, they had taken an entirely different approach to spreading the technology.
In 2010, when they first arrived in Shuanghe Village, they considered the usual models — the company-plus-farmer model, the expert-plus-association model, and so on. In the end, they chose to start with community-building, something entirely separate from technology transfer. They organised the co-operative to set up a performing arts troupe, a seniors’ association, and a women’s association, using interest-based groups to encourage villagers to hold Double Ninth Festival activities, dance in the squares, and enter singing competitions.
Only after the village atmosphere had come alive did they begin promoting the no-till cover ecological method. By then, trust between both sides was firmly established.
“They figure that whatever we are saying must be something for their good. They no longer worry about whether this method will cut the yield — they are simply happy to have somewhere to sing and dance,” Yuan Yong shared.
After three years, Shuanghe Village’s smallholders have embraced this group of technicians from town and the production philosophy they brought with them. Today, this approach is being replicated in more and more villages — like the workshop I observed at Zhaizi Village.
After the session, Yuan Yong and his colleagues rushed straight on to neighbouring Baila Village. This year, Home Action has allocated a budget of 2,000 yuan to Baila Village to encourage the women and elderly to come and dance in the square in the evenings.
“At the moment, we need both outreach models.” Technology promotion to smallholders continues, while partnerships with village collectives proceed in parallel. Developing rural collective economies is the mainstream direction local governments currently support, and among those eager to try are young Village Party Secretaries like Secretary Jiang — the trend must be followed.
Whichever model they use, Home Action seems reluctant to join the various debates swirling around ecological agriculture, nor is their concern limited solely to the income gains from applying the technology. Even the elderly farmers at the Xingzhai Village workshop pay little attention to financial returns. What matters more to everyone is the change in rural production and daily life throughout the process.
By the time we left Baila Village, dusk was closing in and the village’s evening broadcast had just begun. I recalled a self-account that Yuan Yong had published.
He believes the function of agriculture lies in “eating” rather than in “money”. Achieving comprehensive prosperity for farmers solely through selling agricultural produce is extremely difficult. The very nature of agriculture dictates that its important functions are social — ensuring people have food and eat healthily — and ecological — mitigating the environmental pollution caused by industry — rather than economic, that is, making money.
Having followed them throughout Jianyang, what I felt was another face of agriculture — beyond being seen as an industry, it is also a way for people to live better.
All images provided by the author unless otherwise noted
Editor: Ze’en