Three Months of Farming: My Ecological Farm Dream Hits Pause
I. Hands remain the primary “tools of labour”
The question “Are you tired?” constantly cropped up in conversations between the veteran farmhands, the older workers, and us interns. “Tiredness” is how most people experience and perceive agricultural production. In a daily routine that relies so heavily on the use of both hands, I stared at the lines and creases in my fingers, which had never cracked in my 27 years of life, as though they were silently lodging a protest: agricultural civilisation has evolved over thousands of years, yet why has the physical toll of farming hardly diminished? The occupational ailments of office workers attract widespread attention, but what about those of farmers? Have mainstream agricultural technology policies become too skewed in favour of large-scale production systems? Just how many technologies actually benefit small-scale producers?
While Letian Haiwan Farm is not a “smallholding” in the traditional sense, the planting tasks across its roughly 3.3 acres of arable land are sustained almost entirely by four long-term workers, all over the age of seventy. These four veteran hands, well past retirement age, hold the essential know-how required to work this land. If we reach a point where this entire workforce has retired, and we lack the strength to step up and bear the burden, how will we possibly feed ourselves?
The sensation of exhaustion is etched deep into my bones. It was so ingrained that when I heard in July that a few yellow peach trees had succumbed to the heat, my mind didn’t go to how many fewer peaches I’d get to eat. Instead, I thought of the two days I’d spent bagging the fruit while physically and mentally on the verge of collapse—only for them to perish anyway. And after every downpour, while sorting through the vegetables, I’d tell everyone: “From now on, this farm is banning garlic chives. They’re far too fiddly to clean!”
II. Sharing the joy of the harvest
There’s something truly wonderful about the vegetables and fruits that grow from the soil; I find myself wanting to put them on display just to show everyone their vitality. Whenever I’m packing orders for delivery, I can’t help but tuck a little extra into the boxes, hoping to pass on that same thrill of the harvest.
It wasn’t until I started assembling the boxes myself that I truly grasped why post-harvest handling and transport are such vital areas of agricultural research. It’s not just about maintaining quality; the whole process carries our hope of passing on the sheer joy of the work, in full, to the consumers. Even trimming Chinese chives – a chore I dreaded when I first arrived – eventually stopped bothering me. I suppose practice really does make perfect.
III. Animals and Plants on the Farm
Farm work may appear straightforward, but it is underpinned by specialised knowledge and technical expertise. Out in the fields, it looks as though we are simply pinching back edamame seedlings and pruning and thinning the corn, tomatoes, and peaches. But what internal reactions does each of our actions trigger within the plants? Are they content with our “help”? What would they look like if left to grow entirely to their own natural rhythm? Clumsy and unsure of how to tend the crops at the outset, I was constantly chided by “foreman” Mr Wang.
The small animals on the farm each have their own temperaments, and they occasionally fall ill with conditions we do not recognise, or face moments that threaten their very survival. In early March, “novice human parents” that we were, we attempted to hatch ducklings using an incubator. After turning the eggs, we forgot to close the lid, causing the temperature to plummet. Of the twenty eggs we placed inside, only half managed to hatch.
Later, for reasons unclear, the ducklings, now about a month old, began to falter one by one, struggling to stand and showing increased discharge from their eyes and noses. Lacking veterinary expertise, we novice parents scrambled at the last minute, trawling the internet until we provisionally diagnosed them with septicemia. We meticulously administered fractions of a gram of medication to each bird, carefully measured according to weight, yet ultimately only the three strongest survived. On 5 July, before the duck parents had even seen their surviving offspring, they were all bitten to death in a sudden attack by stray dogs.
The flora on the farm shifts with the passing months, and weeding has ceased to be a mere chore, becoming instead an opportunity for first-hand observation.
When I first arrived in early April, I encountered many plants unfamiliar to me from my time in Guangdong: petty spurge forming neat geometric rosettes, cleavers so thin it clung to neighbouring foliage with tiny barbs along its stems, spring fleabane carpeting the slopes with white blossoms as a harbinger of spring, and purple-flowering hemistepta and creeping thistle, to name a few.
I had initially marvelled at the absence of alligator weed, which is rampant in Guangdong, only to realise in May that the earlier temperatures simply hadn’t been warm enough to bring them out. Both the farm’s weeds and crops follow strict seasonal cycles; once that window passes, you’ll have to wait until next year to see them again. Perhaps it is precisely this seasonality that leaves a quiet blend of wistfulness and anticipation.
IV. The Ideal and Reality of Ecological Farming
The fertiliser situation offers a glimpse into the practical constraints on the farm’s ability to function as a closed-loop system: cropping area, labour, capital, infrastructure, site layout and workflow, climate, and fertiliser quality, among others. An agricultural system that could theoretically be far more self-sufficient seems constrained by these practical realities, as well as external factors such as land-use zoning and a multitude of permit requirements. In many ways, the farm still falls short of the ideals set out in ecological, organic, and permaculture theories. Yet, given current conditions, this may well be the most workable solution for keeping the farm running.
Real-world challenges also come to the fore with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). In an ideal CSA model, members and producers share the risks of farming. Yet after three months of observation, I found that some members do not fully grasp the CSA philosophy. One member complained to us that this year’s crops in her plot were worse than those of her neighbours. As service providers, we are duty-bound to ensure consumers receive quality produce, but there is a widespread tendency among consumers to share in the harvest without wishing to bear the losses caused by external factors.
Furthermore, the vision of shortening the food supply chain through a direct-to-consumer ecological farm has not been fully realised. Geographically, the farm is located in Fengxian District, Shanghai, a remote suburb that even locals are reluctant to call part of the city. Many surrounding residents already have their own plots of land, so they have no need for an external farm-to-table service. Among the fifty-plus members who have leased plots, very few stick to regular deliveries, let alone make frequent trips to pick their own produce. Much of the fine harvest simply rotted in the field, waiting in vain for members to arrive, never making it to the table.
Sometimes I wonder: can ‘eating seasonally, eating locally’ truly meet my dietary needs? By the end of July, the farm yielded around twenty varieties of fruit and vegetables. Supermarkets, by contrast, offer more than thirty organic options, with an even wider range of conventional ones. Compared with a supermarket, the farm currently lacks mushroom products and is short on herbs and garnishes. The newly sown coriander struggled to grow during the plum rain season, and after the heatwave, there was hardly any usable leafy green left.
After spending half a month juggling just a handful of ingredients, constantly trying to cook up new variations, I realised that while relying on a single farm’s harvest might keep you fed, it falls short of satisfying the psychological and emotional needs that food fulfils for me. I have to admit that for consumers who enjoy a wide variety of ingredients, being able to savour produce from all over the world is indeed a privilege. Viewed from another angle, this global appreciation may also indirectly help preserve local food traditions in far-flung corners of the world.
Finally, farms like Letian Haiwan, which primarily cater to urban leisure experiences, must also meet customers’ aesthetic expectations. To keep the farm from looking too ‘wild’, we have to trim the lawns and tame the lush roadside vegetation before every event. Every time I see the bare earth left exposed after pruning, I feel a sense of loss and regret. But personal preferences must inevitably yield to the demands of customers, who ultimately hold more sway.
V. Memories Woven Together Over Meals
Finally, to tie this all together with food as the thread, I’d say my post-farm withdrawal symptoms amount to missing the grand plans Boss Yuan used to sketch out for us; Xiao Ling’s wasabi chicken, a specialty from her hometown; Xiao Lu’s waterfall bread; Xiao Liu’s scrambled eggs with tomato; the twenty-five crayfish Xiaotong caught over two nights; Master Wang’s white-cut chicken (which only materialised after a bit of coaxing); the horsehead grass and pork zongzi wrapped by Member Auntie Gu; Auntie Hua’s habit of dusting her veg with a pinch of chilli powder for extra kick; and the farm’s seasonal delights—cucumber jelly, the classic eggplant, potato and pepper stir-fry, strawberry jam, iced watermelon, and tomatoes tossed in sugar. I’ll also miss the farm’s living “food waste processors”—Princess Potato and the endearingly unpredictable Xiaobao. To the next cohort of interns: please look after them well.
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