After a Master’s in the Humanities, I Became a Fruit Grower at a Property Company
After three years of studying rural sociology, my relationship with the industry still felt as though a thin veil separated us. I wanted to understand through practice why it is so hard to be a farmer – where, exactly, the hardship lies and where the difficulty lies. At the same time, I knew that diving headfirst into fieldwork did not sit well with society’s expectations for someone with a higher education. The compromise I settled on was becoming a fruit grower at a property company.
I. Growing Fruit Trees from Scratch – Quite the Challenge
My responsibilities included planning outdoor educational excursions at the farm and managing production across both the farm and the orchard. Fruit yield and sales revenue were key KPIs. I refused point-blank at first: “Organising events is one thing, but I genuinely don’t know a thing about growing fruit. I’ve got neither the knowledge nor the experience – how on earth is that supposed to work?”
I voiced my concerns honestly, and to my surprise the boss laughed warmly and said, “Don’t worry, we’re all beginners here. Let’s just get on with it!” And so it was that, half in a daze, I embarked on two years as a fruit grower.
II. Trying New Varieties
City S sits on an alluvial plain formed by Yellow River floods, with fertile soil and a favourable climate. As a result, fruit growing is particularly common here – the area around our project alone is surrounded by no fewer than ten thousand mu of orchards. Local farmers have been growing fruit trees since the 1960s, and apart from a few peaches, grapes and strawberries, the mainstay crop is the pear.
The region’s pear products have earned National Geographical Indication Protection, yet they have never achieved the renown of the Korla Fragrant Pear or the Dangshan Crisp Pear. One reason is that the local pear varieties are simply too old-fashioned to match today’s consumer preferences. Each April, the pear blossom season makes for a spectacular view across the orchard, but the fruit that follows is neither sweet enough nor crisp enough to find a market, and the price naturally never rises.
On the recommendation of staff at the local Agricultural Technology Station, the company chose an early-maturing pear variety with strong market acceptance. It is a new crossbred variety developed and selected in recent years by the Jiangsu Academy of Agricultural Sciences, well suited to local conditions.
III. Early-Maturing Pears: Not So Easy to Grow
The spring and summer work centred on pollinating the trees, flower and fruit thinning, and fruit bagging. The new pear variety has a relatively high self-fertility rate, but to guarantee the fruit set rate, pollinator trees still needed to be placed throughout the orchard, supplemented by beehives or hand pollination.
If heavy rain falls during the pollination window, both bees and hand pollination are affected, potentially causing a severe drop in yield. And even when the weather cooperates, pollination is no easy task. Pear blossom lasts only around twenty days, yet our orchard covers nearly 300 mu with tens of thousands of trees, every single flower needing to be dusted with pollen – a workload almost beyond imagination.
After pollination there are roughly ten days of respite before flower and fruit thinning must begin. Choosing which fruits to keep is a highly skilled art: one must maintain a sufficient leaf-to-fruit ratio, a technique I have yet to master to this day.
Weeding, too, is another extraordinarily labour-intensive task. To preserve soil fertility and water retention, we leave some weeds between the pear trees. But if those weeds grow too vigorous and their roots dig too deep, they may compete with the trees for soil moisture and nutrients, so weeding is essentially needed every month through the summer. With fewer workers available, we often find that weeding simply cannot keep pace with the rate of regrowth.
Every one of these tasks was a complete first for me as a novice fruit grower. And beyond the work in the fields, other challenges awaited.
IV. Managing People
I remember one time a particularly quick and capable older woman worker suddenly handed in her notice, saying she had to pick up her granddaughter from nursery school at three or four in the afternoon, and the timings clashed. But it happened to be the critical fruit-bagging period, and losing one skilled worker could mean over a hundred trees failing to bear fruit. What to do? After a moment’s thought, I suggested she bring her granddaughter into the office area to play and then walk home together at the end of the day.
Small matters like this cropped up constantly. Managing workers who are two zodiac cycles older than me called for keeping a low profile and communicating in a way they could fully understand – that was the most effective management strategy. And above all, the more important thing throughout this process was understanding and respecting farmers.
In addition to managing the workforce, I had to purchase various pieces of farm machinery and equipment for the orchard’s production, all while complying with the company’s administrative regulations. Under the rules, I had to submit a spending plan for the following month at the start of each month and go through layers of approval before any equipment could be bought. Yet many needs in agricultural production are simply last-minute. During that first year, in order not to miss the farming calendar, I tried every trick in the book to navigate the bureaucracy – not to say it was exhausting.
V. Growing Pears Is Hard; Selling Them Is Harder
After many a first, all that stumbling through our first year still paid off – the orchard bore fruit – and hearing colleagues praise the pears’ flavour gave me a wonderful sense of accomplishment. Yet another challenge was already looming.
As everyone knows, fresh fruit has a very short shelf life and is not easy to keep. Three hundred mu of output is not a great deal in itself – neither building a cold store nor leasing one would be worthwhile. Faced with the pressure of our performance review, we had no choice but to sell everything within a short window.
Looking back, our expectations for the new variety had perhaps been a touch too optimistic. After canvassing numerous fruit markets, supermarkets and fruit shops, we found that the early-maturing pear was simply too new to the market to be widely accepted.
The orchard’s scale presented another awkward predicament: on one hand, it was not small enough to function like Community Supported Agriculture, where a few dozen to a hundred consumers could absorb the farm’s entire output. On the other, it was not large enough to attract the stable, bulk purchasing arrangements that major agricultural companies enjoy.
Some say the emergence of e-commerce platforms is a bottom-up revolution beginning at the downstream end of the supply chain. Yet by my observation, what consumers can decide is only whether to enter the online market – they cannot influence what is actually available to buy. Small-scale producers are shut out at the gate of productisation and standardisation, peering at consumers through a door they cannot open.
To bypass the layers of middlemen in the supply chain and reach consumers directly, we ultimately fell back on the traditional circle-based approach: taste first, then buy; word of mouth; targeted sales. From monitoring orders and dispatching deliveries to handling customer service afterwards, everything was done in-house – we truly lived through the meaning of “every single step was so hard-won”.
VI. A Temporary Farewell to the Orchard
But regardless, agriculture is worth trying. Only by understanding the relationship between people, food and nature from the producer’s perspective can we cast our consumer votes more wisely.
All photographs in this article were taken by the author.
Edited by: Ze’en