In Shanghai: Half City, Half Pastoral Dream

by Posted on

Letian Haiwan Farm in Fengxian, Shanghai, is anything but a conventional ecological farm.

When I arrived for my internship in March this year, I immediately felt things here were quite different from what I had imagined farming to be: it wasn’t just about growing crops — there was land to rent out, events to run. One can’t help but marvel: no wonder it’s Shanghai — even a farm gets this elaborate.

The farm covers more than eighty mu (a Chinese unit of land area, roughly 667 m²). Besides over forty mu of woodland and more than twenty mu of shared open space, the remaining twenty-plus mu has been cultivated and divided into a campervan area and tiny allotment plots of just a tenth or a twentieth of a mu, rented out to farm members. The plots are tended day to day by the farm’s workers, and members can either drive out to pick their own produce or pay a delivery fee to have it brought to their door.

Over the three months I spent here, all manner of unexpected stories unfolded, giving me the chance to observe the interplay between city and land, and to reflect on my own choices.

●Those long, narrow rows are the small allotment plots rented by farm members. Image courtesy of the farm.

I. Starting with a Single Tomato

When I first arrived at the farm, my job was to follow the farm’s workers out to the fields and lend a hand. But as a complete novice, I probably made more work than help — even a task as simple as placing raised tomato seedlings into the soil could go wrong. Planting seedlings takes a particular technique: you must not touch the stem and root area of the tomato. The best approach is to hold the seedling by its leaves and lower it into the ground, because the fine hairs on the stem make the seedling fragile — once they’ve been handled, it will easily die. At one point, we newcomers were advised to give up on the task altogether; the workers told us: ‘Thanks for all your hard work — without you, we’d have been done ages ago.’

● On the left, a tomato seedling whose root was touched and has since died; on the right, one growing healthily.

But placing the seedlings is only the first step. They must be watered on the day they are planted and again the next. And you can’t simply spray from a hose — I had to keep crouching down and standing back up, filling a watering can again and again, and with the sun beating down, I’d feel exhausted after just a short while. Even once in the ground, tomato seedlings can fail to grow due to the weather, the soil, or pests, in which case replacements are needed. All told, seedlings need replacing about three times to ensure every plot has enough survivors.

I once thought of tagging a single tomato seedling to follow how it might make it through. But the tomato hadn’t even grown big before I was overwhelmed by the endless, fussy chain of steps: raising seedlings, clearing the old crops from the field, turning over the soil, applying fertiliser, making planting holes, watering, placing the seedlings, watering again on the same day and the next, replacing seedlings three times, watering, tying up with twine, removing side shoots, tying up with twine a second and third time, removing side shoots a second and third time, covering with netting.

After all that labour, if you are lucky enough not to lose your tomato to the birds, you can finally bite into one perfectly ripe. But because the farm does not use conventional chemical pesticides, mishaps like this are common: after much searching, you spot a gorgeous, deep-red tomato, pick it up, and discover the underside has already been nibbled away.

● Carrots of wildly varying sizes — one cannot help wondering: were you truly planted in the same batch?

● A joyful harvest moment: when strawberries come flooding in during the season, the ones fit for sale are picked out, and the rest are ours to eat. Below, the farm’s interns share freshly squeezed strawberry juice at a group meal.

II. Is a Tenth of a Mu Enough to Feed a Family of Three?

The allotment plots rented by farm members are roughly a tenth or a twentieth of a mu. Even counting generously, a full year’s harvest amounts to about 60–70 varieties of vegetables, all grown using ecological methods — no chemical pesticides, no chemical fertiliser. I often ask the members: can the vegetables here meet your family’s needs? The answer is almost always the same: there’s more than enough, far more than enough — we even have plenty to give to friends and neighbours. But if I probe a little deeper, what I get is a rather different picture: bread, milk, congee and flatbread for breakfast; lunch at the company canteen; and only at dinner do you get home and cook a proper meal, using the farm’s vegetables — plus a duck bought from outside. Once, a woman told me she was taking the farm’s peas home to make fried rice. Yet in that single plate, apart from the farm’s peas, the baby pak choi, egg, prawns, diced carrot, rice and diced mushrooms all had to be sourced elsewhere.

● This is the produce a regular member family receives in a single delivery.

So even though these families harvest from the farm, they still find themselves regularly reliant on the food supply system beyond its gates. What lies behind their food reflects the social circumstances of their lives: children need to get to school and there is no time to cook in the morning; work keeps them busy and lunch has to come from somewhere else; and although there is time to cook at dinner, eating only the handful of vegetables the farm produces, day after day, grows old very quickly. Behind every weekly trip to the farm lies an everyday life sustained by online fresh-food retailers and supermarkets.

I have asked them, too: aren’t you worried about food safety when buying vegetables from outside? The answer is usually: we do worry, but what else can we do? For one thing, buying exclusively organic vegetables is simply too expensive; for another, they can’t really taste the difference between the two.

Admittedly, whether organic vegetables are truly more nutritious or tastier cannot be said for certain. What can be said, however, is that the farm’s growing methods contribute to ecological conservation — a point that consumers do not tend to weigh heavily. Beyond one’s own food safety, there is the wider matter of caring for humanity’s living spaces and environment, yet few people think in such terms. In the end, it is usually personal considerations that drive their choices.

● When drawing up the planting plan, each member’s preferences also have to be taken into account.

III. The Imagined Pastoral and Commerce as a Supplement

Sometimes I also ask members: you spend 5,000 yuan a year here on a tenth-of-a-mu plot and all you get back is these vegetables — do you think it’s worth it? The reply is always the same: once you factor in fuel and road tolls, you can’t even tell how much food you could buy elsewhere, so you can’t look at it purely in terms of the produce — what really matters is being able to bring the children here to play. Food isn’t the only thing that draws them to the farm. This land also carries many an urbanite’s pastoral fantasy: picking fresh vegetables straight from the plot, enjoying a landscape unlike anything in the city, letting children connect with nature.

Perhaps it is precisely this fantasy that leads to the situation where some members have rented their plots for two or three years and still cannot recognise a corn seedling, or tell which vegetables are edible and which are not. A rent of 5,000 yuan a year does not, in itself, signal their attachment to this land or to the labour on it. It is the vegetables, combined with the other things they truly value, that together form the motivation behind every card payment.

●Campervan members enjoying an evening get-together.
●A nature education activity hosted by the farm.

To meet such expectations, the farm must invest in far more labour than farming alone requires: keeping the grounds tidy, providing space and facilities for play, and hiring extra hands to tend members’ plots. Beyond that, the farm also needs the extra income from nature education and other events to make up for the shortfall in land-rental revenue. This demands that people devoted to agriculture learn marketing, education and customer service — becoming something of an all-rounder — and pour far more of their energy into it.

Fortunately, after a long period of communication and give-and-take, the imagined pastoral and the real setting have gradually merged into one. Among the members, too, there are plenty who genuinely care about the farm and truly value this land.

On rainy days, the roots of leafy greens bring up a lot of mud when the deliveries are being assembled, and they do look rather filthy — yet not a single member has complained. Even if the greens haven’t been picked with the utmost care, or the weather means the same few varieties have to be delivered week after week, very few people grumble. These past weeks of heat have meant that leafy greens wilt almost the instant they’re picked — never mind what condition they’ll be in by the time they reach customers the next day.

I am convinced that if these members were simply shopping elsewhere, many would much prefer produce that had been washed and presented more neatly. Put the farm’s vegetables on a supermarket shelf and they might not even glance at them. One member once told me that when she buys vegetables at a shop, she makes sure to go early for the freshest batch — she wouldn’t even leave them overnight.

But now, at least some consumers are slowly beginning to change, through the land and the vegetables they receive from the farm. They are starting to recognise what out-of-season vegetables look like and accepting the idea of eating in rhythm with the seasons; they are learning that summer leafy greens will inevitably be nibbled by insects, and can reason that the pristine, unblemished greens at the market must have been sprayed with pesticides.

●Leafy greens with mud clinging to their roots during a rainy-day packing session.

IV. Will You Stay Here?

Shortly after arriving at the farm, fellow intern Xiaozhu asked me: Will you stay here? Three months on, as I reflect on that question again, the greatest perplexity I feel is this: my work here doesn’t seem to require a university degree at all — so what can I actually do? This is also a question members frequently ask me: what are you doing here, just farming? I remember on my first day at the farm, 10 March, our job was to lay gravel at the farm’s insect habitat. Several students with bachelor’s, master’s or doctoral degrees from Project 211 universities or above had gathered around. All I could think at the time was: perhaps the devaluation of degrees back in Lujiazui isn’t even as severe as it is here.

● Of the five people laying gravel in the photo, three graduated from Project 211 universities. But the work was hard — I couldn’t even manage it properly. Image courtesy of the farm.
● Laying turf is also part of the farm’s daily routine.

Indeed, whether interns or consumers, many people feel adrift in the city, unable to find meaning in life. Even with what looks like a respectable job, they are merely data labourers in their cubicles — male and female — which is precisely why they long to come to the farm and feel solid ground beneath their feet.

The consumers have already found their meaning. Whether every weekend or once a month, the trips to the farm to enjoy relaxation and the joy of harvest give them a sense of steadiness in a life wrapped in anxiety and uncertainty. They even manage to rebuild their urban lives — sharing the farm’s ecological vegetables with neighbours they may not know particularly well, opening up new social networks.

The interns, however, may still be on the road. I once asked Teacher Yuan, who runs the farm: those who quit their previous jobs to take up farming — is it because they have lived more, and know more clearly what they want, that they can set aside outsiders’ gaze and worldly judgements to devote themselves to agriculture? He said it has nothing to do with age; it has to do with whether you have a plan of your own. Some people look young, yet they knew what they wanted very early on.

For me and the other interns, plans for the future feel far from clear. We are still wavering between choices. Between the city and the pastoral dream, the farm has to be strategic and adapt — and interns like me are no exception. Even though one intern declares she came to farm to “rebel” — to leave the conventional path and enter agriculture, which her parents see as a career with no prospects — she still chose Letian, this unconventional farm, based on her field of study, hoping to pick up skills that could serve her in any other profession.

Looking back on this farm journey, I find that the farm offered me a temporary in-between space, setting me apart from a society that reveres material wealth. And because I have truly experienced how exhausting it is to grow things, I have come to genuinely treasure food — taking only as much as I can finish at a meal. Even now, back at school, the part of me that was set apart has not left my life; it gives me the resolve to hold my ground and a clear head. The farm is like a waystation and a place to recharge. You may stay for a while before returning to the track of your original life, but you will learn something from the soil. It lingers with you, and in the long run, it may well shape you — perhaps even lead you into the industry itself.

● New skill in progress: kneading dough.
Foodthink author | Xiaocui
Second-cohort Ecological Agriculture Intern at Foodthink. An anthropology student struggling to graduate; a maximalist who loves food. Signature dish: stir-fried tomato and egg. Hopes to one day have her own balcony garden, where she plans to grow tomatoes, cucumbers and chillies.

 

 

 

 

About the Ecological Farm Internship Programme

In early 2023, Foodthink published the call for applications for the second cohort of its Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme. Twenty-one interns were ultimately selected, and they have been arriving in sequence at nine ecological farms across the country, beginning internships ranging from two months to one year. Our aim is to connect young people interested in ecological agriculture with established ecological farms, so that the former can acquire practical farming knowledge and techniques, the experience of veteran growers can be documented and passed on, and the shortage of skilled labour on farms can be addressed. Please continue to follow the Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme!

Unless otherwise stated, all images in this article were taken by the author Edited by: Wang Hao

Published by Foodthink