An Ecological Smallholder Farmer Watches “Snow Leopard”: Whom Should I Empathise With?

II. A Film That Captures Only the Tip of the Iceberg

III. Who Is Really Invading Whose Life?

IV. As a Smallholder Farmer, Whom Do I Empathise With?

After “graduating” from Foodthink’s first ecological agriculture internship programme, I came to Weihai to run a small ecological fruit orchard on my own. The orchard sits on the hillside at mid-mountain. To the north, just across a road, lies the natural scenic area up in the hills; to the south is a stretch of mixed woodland; on the east and west sides there are shallow gullies, beyond which lie other people’s orchards.

Since taking over this orchard last spring, I have been practising ecological cultivation: no chemical pesticides, no artificial fertilisers, making fermented plant extract, making compost, letting the grass grow, introducing more crop varieties and enhancing biodiversity. After all these efforts, without the technological “magic” of chemical pesticides and artificial fertilisers lending a hand, the first year’s yield was, as one would expect, pitifully low.

Since the orchard sits on the edge of the forested mountains, traces of wild animals are a frequent sight — magpies, pheasants, hares and the like, a never-ending stream of visitors.

The birds love to dig up freshly sown seeds and eat them, or fly to the branches to peck at the biggest, ripest fruit. The hares are particular about their food: they turn up their noses at ordinary weeds and favour only plants from the Fabaceae and Brassicaceae families. Whether it is soybeans, peanuts, radishes or leafy greens, they are eaten clean the moment the seedlings emerge.

Yet the neighbours in the orchard next door grow perfectly healthy vegetables — it is only my crops that suffer. After making some enquiries, I finally understood why birds rarely damage their crops. They coat their seeds with pesticide, which prevents both soil insects from eating the seeds and birds from digging them up. As for why the hares only come to my orchard, a comparison of the two sites makes it plain. In the other orchards, weeds are cleared away cleanly from the ground, while in mine the grass only gets cut once it reaches knee height. Hares would be far too exposed in their orchards, whereas mine offers cover everywhere.

Just like the herders in the film, I too initially blamed these wild animals for the losses in my orchard. After all, my original reason for choosing ecological agriculture was to protect the environment — yet once the orchard’s environment improved and attracted little creatures, I began to resent them.

After a spell of self-reflection, I began actively exploring ways to keep hares and birds at bay without causing them any harm. I tried fencing off the vegetable beds, but for one thing fences can’t stop birds, and for another, in Weihai’s winds — which easily reach Force 7 or 8 — my makeshift fence blew over almost as soon as I had put it up. I also tried using scent and sound to deter the hares, but that made no difference either. In the end, on a fellow farmer’s advice, I set up low tunnels from insect netting to shut out the birds and the hares, and I can now finally grow beans and vegetables on a small scale.

Compared to the orchard next door, where a spray of pesticide sorts everything out, I really am going through hoops. But all this toil and mental strain — I had steeled myself for it well before choosing the path of ecological agriculture, so it doesn’t feel like hardship.

While I empathise with the herders in the film when it comes to the trouble wild animals cause for farming and herding, our situations are fundamentally different. I decided to leave behind a glamorous city job (aka. the corporate-drone life at a Big Tech firm) and pursue ecological agriculture because I recognise that its essence is not simply to produce safe food, but to foster a harmonious, sustainable relationship between agriculture and the environment. Once I grasped the urgency and severity of climate change, I actively chose to forgo a portion of my “gain” as a farmer in favour of the natural world.

The herders, who live on the high-altitude plateaus and are largely “invisible” in modern society, almost entirely bear the consequences of ecological destruction by default. In the pursuit of high-speed GDP growth, we often rally with slogans about achieving a goal “at all costs”, yet rarely stop to ask whether those who truly pay “the price of development” do so willingly. It is only when environmental problems have become a vital global development issue that people begin to talk about wildlife conservation. In this process, we can see the government’s resolve and the efforts of researchers, yet we hear very little about the grassroots farmers and herders who suffer economic losses because of wild animals.

This is also why I have long admired the director Pema Tseden: he never employs a voyeuristic lens to depict the lives of Tibetan people. Instead, with a deep care for all life, he explores the complex relationships between ordinary individuals and the times, society, and nature.

“Snow Leopard” is like a prism refracting a host of social issues, inviting us to consider the philosophical question of how humanity and the natural world can coexist. Here I am, farming in the hills of Weihai, and I feel especially grateful to Pema Tseden for allowing me, in a small-town cinema a thousand li away, to truly see the herders’ plight. Stepping out of the cinema, I too will continue exploring, through the practice of ecological agriculture, a harmonious relationship between people and nature.