To farm the land, he opened a noodle factory
Three months ago, a young couple farming in Gansu welcomed a baby boy and named him Maizi, meaning ‘Wheat’. His mother, Shitou, wrote on her social media: “I hope that young Maizi Yin, born from Shitou’s land, grows as resiliently as our stony land Hongguangtou wheat. May he walk the path of human life with strength and conviction, loving himself and others, remaining clear-headed and kind, grateful for life, and experiencing everything to the fullest. May Shitou, Maizi, and Huahua accompany one another as they grow, each carving out their own great path in this world.”
Before little Maizi was born, his father, Huahua, and mother, Shitou, had already been farming in their hometown in Gansu for nearly ten years. They founded “Yan Gui Qing“, a noodle brand specialising in the traditional northwestern wheat variety ‘Hongguangtou’, and achieved something rare for young returnees: they “established” their own noodle processing factory.
In truth, however, Huahua’s greatest passion has always been farming—specifically, growing chickpeas. As a child living in the mountains of Wuwei, he remembers chickpeas growing everywhere along the edges of the fields; deep-fried and eaten plain, they were incredibly fragrant.
In the 1990s, following a government ‘residential consolidation’ programme, his family moved down to a village near the Yellow Irrigation Canal (an irrigation channel drawing water from the Yellow River), and the chickpeas were no longer grown. Yet, the memory lingered in his heart, eventually becoming the driving force behind his return to the land.
Once he actually returned, the fragmented reality of the work—leasing land, selecting sites, overseeing planting, setting up the factory, hiring workers, managing sales, and livestreaming—left Huahua with little time to carefully tend to his bean fields.
Processing flour guaranteed a profit, but farming guaranteed a loss. Faced with the arithmetic of actual income, payment cycles, and risks, how does one maintain the original intention of ecological farming? For Huahua and Shitou, the answer was a difficult one: they had to survive first.
I. Shared Risk
However, upon returning home in 2016, he found himself acting as a ‘middleman’. His Yan Gui Qing cooperative platform partnered with farmers to purchase a specialty heritage variety: Hongguangtou wheat grown in stony land. This local variety is grown on arid land covered in Gobi stones in the Hexi Corridor. While yields are low, the wheat is highly fragrant with a firm, chewy texture, making it ideal for flour and noodles. For a returnee in his twenties with no savings, the investment required to lease land was far greater than that of processing; being a middleman was a more stable path to entrepreneurship.
This was not Huahua’s original dream. He had hoped to lease land from farmers and cultivate it himself. But after three consecutive years, the twenty or thirty mu of land he found in his own village produced poor yields. In a desert climate where one is entirely at the mercy of nature and evaporation is intense, the yield of Hongguangtou wheat depends almost entirely on rainfall. Yields can drop to below 100 jin per mu, peaking at 400 jin—a mere fraction of conventional farming yields. Consequently, most farmers have shifted towards large-scale production, and smallholders with only a few dozen mu are now rare.
Between 2017 and 2018, Huahua faced the departure of his partners and had to start over alone. Early reports described his entrepreneurial journey as a series of ‘repeated failures’. Fortunately, in 2018, he met Shitou, a woman from Shaanxi. Steady and dependable, the girl—whose name means ‘Stone’—jokes that she was ‘lured’ in by the fragrance of the Hongguangtou noodles.
It was also in 2018 that Huahua met a new partner: Uncle Su, a large-scale grain farmer in Sitan Township, Jingtai City, about 80 kilometres from Gulang County. The area is also suitable for Hongguangtou wheat, and the stony land Uncle Su developed alone spans nearly 1,000 mu. With his help and management, Huahua has now reached agreements to purchase wheat from growers covering 2,000 mu in Sitan Township.
Shitou notes that due to the recent economic downturn, Hongguangtou wheat, priced at 2 yuan per jin, is double the price of ordinary wheat. Local sales are poor, and farmers’ warehouses are overflowing with stockpiles from previous years. This has made Huahua’s ‘large-scale’ purchasing easier—his buying price is a few cents higher, sometimes reaching 2.6 or 2.7 yuan.
In a sense, Huahua’s ability to collaborate with farmers and obtain wheat that meets ecological standards is a result of ‘economic arithmetic’. When drought limits yield, the increase provided by chemical fertilisers becomes negligible. In recent years, the average yield of Hongguangtou in Sitan Township has been only around 100 jin per mu. Even for farmers accustomed to applying 3–5 jin of fertiliser per mu, this unprofitable habit can be changed.
More importantly, herbicides are essentially useless in new stony land. Before the stones were laid, the land was a wasteland; exposed to wind and sun with few weed seeds, almost no weeds grew for the first ten years.
Huahua admits that collaborative purchasing shifts some of the risk onto the farmers: whether the crop fails entirely or the flour cannot be sold, Yan Gui Qing does not bear the loss. Furthermore, Huahua only settles payments for the previous batch of wheat when he purchases a new one, which keeps his cash flow healthy. Yet, this remains a reluctant win-win—as an outsider, if Huahua were to lease the land himself, the rent would be higher and the risk significantly greater than that borne by the farmers.
Uncle Su is also better equipped than Huahua to “supervise” the partner farmers. As the local “machinery king”, his control over the means of production allows him to know exactly which villagers need to rent equipment for pesticide application right from the source.
However, this unique flavour does not necessarily translate into increased income for the villagers of Sitan Township. With government subsidies, Sitan Township has built reservoirs and intends to install drip irrigation and develop high-standard farmland. Once the constraints of drought are removed, farmers may rush to plant conventional sandy-soil fruits and vegetables that offer higher profits. Ecology and livelihood are difficult to balance, and their partnership with Huahua may not last.
Fortunately, the installation of village water pipes has been postponed. Huahua has not yet sought new partner farmers; instead, he plans to find some land in the villages near the noodle factory to conduct further “experiments”—planting Hongguangtou directly without laying stone foundations.
II. Venturing into the “Secondary Industry”
The key to making money from wheat is processing it properly and selling it.
But in the beginning, noodle processing was a loss-making venture. At the contract factories, once the production line started, huge quantities of noodles were produced. If sales were slow, the noodles would just sit in the warehouse and go rancid, leading to high wastage.
Flour processing was another cost. At its peak, it cost 800 yuan per tonne; by 2023, this had dropped to 300 yuan per tonne.
An opportunity arrived in 2023: a village collective noodle factory in Zhitan Town, Wuwei, was poorly managed and put up for lease. This small plant had all the necessary production permits and spacious premises, so Huahua and Shitou decided to take it over.
Owning their “own” noodle factory gave Yan Gui Qing production control for the first time. With three or four full-time employees on standby, they could process and package several different flavours of noodles. It became easier to experiment with new flavours, and they could even process wheat for other farming friends for a fee. They now operate almost daily, with a daily processing volume of 300–400 catties, consuming 100 tonnes of flour a year.
If sales increase, higher production is well within reach—the 4,000 mu of new sandy land in Uncle Su’s village could supply over 400 tonnes of flour, four times their current annual consumption.
However, the two of them are overwhelmed. In 2024, Yan Gui Qing wanted to hire a full-time employee to help manage the factory, and by 2025, they hoped to hire someone for livestreaming—as livestream commerce has become popular within the ecological farming circle. In the first half of the year, Shitou livestreamed the process of pulling noodles in the sandy fields, which was quite effective. But in the second half, with his partner nearing the end of her pregnancy and orders increasing, the small family became busier, and the livestreams were paused.
III. Rain-soaked “Chickpea Dreams”
But the dream met a harsh reality—the chickpeas frequently suffered total crop failure. For four years, he lost money on this land, eventually forcing him to scale back his operations to 200 mu in a single village.
“So many weeds again!” were the first words Huahua spoke as he climbed over the fence and entered the field. It is a ninety-minute drive from home, and he is simply stretched too thin to visit often.
In Gansu, where irrigation is scarce and most arable land is dryland, Huahua once felt incredibly lucky to lease this precious plot with natural rainfall for only 100 yuan per mu.
He had not expected, however, that there would be too much rain. Weeds grew back as soon as they were pulled, becoming Huahua’s greatest expense.
Last June, to weed 100 mu of land, he hired workers for a month straight. At the peak, there were up to 60 people a day, costing 500 yuan per mu, with total expenditures amounting to nearly 50,000 yuan.
This year, he changed his hiring method. Using his new-energy vehicle, he personally collects casual labourers from the village; they earn 120 yuan a day, but as a car can only carry four people, he hired another vehicle—bringing the cost to 160 yuan per person, including the car. During the peak farming season, Huahua wakes up at five in the morning to drive the workers to the fields and sends them back to the village at seven in the evening, returning home after eight.
This year has seen even more rain, and a single round of weeding is no longer enough. But if he were to weed a second time, “even if chickpeas sold for 50 yuan a jin, it would still be a loss.”
It was also this year that he first heard that the local Tibetan farmers had begun using herbicides.
Aside from the weeds, excessive rain causes these cold-hardy, drought-tolerant legumes to become ‘leggy’—all stem and no seed. Squeezing the chickpea pods in the field reveals they are hollow. August is usually the critical stage for their growth.
Huahua says that if the weather clears now, the hollow pods might still have a chance to fill, but if the rain persists, this year’s harvest is unlikely. After the National Day holiday, it will begin to snow in Tianzhu, bringing the growing season to a close.
Last August, Tianzhu also saw a whole month of incessant rain. By September, the rain continued, leaving the black soil muddy and cloying for days, which hindered the harvest. The chickpeas developed small black mould spots and looked unappealing. Despite Huahua and Shitou sorting them twice—using both machinery and manual labour—and adding a specific notice on the sales platform, some customers still requested refunds upon delivery.
This August, while we were walking through the fields in Tianzhu, the sky clouded over before 3 pm. Shortly after we got back into the car, heavy raindrops began drumming against the windows.
As long as the losses aren’t catastrophic, Huahua is unwilling to give up this scenic private plot, which he envisions as a place to retire. He is considering using plastic mulch for the chickpea fields next year to suppress the rampant weeds. This would mean higher labour costs; previously, Huahua and Shitou operated the tractor and seeder themselves, spending only a few dozen yuan per mu on seeds and fuel.
“I’m essentially paying a premium to enjoy life here,” he says.
IV. Farming as a Gamble
Chickpeas command a high unit price and have strong market acceptance, and Huahua is able to source local heirloom varieties from relatives and individual vendors at farmers’ markets. Provided there is no extreme weather, they are certainly worth going all-in on.
He also increased his acreage of flaxseed, which is heartier against both drought and floods, leading to more stable yields. This year, before the harvest even began, all of Huahua’s flaxseeds were bought up by an ecological processor. However, considering the costs of transport, oil extraction, packaging, and sales, the purchase price may not be particularly high. With flaxseed grown in both Gansu and Qinghai, the competition in supply is fierce. Huahua didn’t dare risk increasing production too much.
One year, encouraged by the county government, Huahua also grew goji berries. The crop is delicate and labour-intensive, but it can fetch 10 to 20 yuan per catty in the conventional market, offering considerable returns.
Unexpectedly, however, the seedlings provided to the farmers were faulty, and the goji berries suffered a total wipeout. Across 200 mu of land, Huahua lost hundreds of thousands of yuan, while some in the neighbouring village lost over two million—they had been spraying pesticides once a week and employing dozens of people daily to weed the fields. In the end, the leaders of the Forestry and Fruit Bureau were taken away, and the promised government subsidy of 200 yuan per mu never materialised. Huahua, conversely, felt lucky that he had managed his land more sparsely and hadn’t invested too much.
In this sense, farming is not merely a matter of arithmetic; it is a gamble. Beyond natural disasters and the timing of the seasons, fluctuations in purchase prices and defects in seedlings or seeds leave farmers seemingly powerless.
Another village in Tianzhu where Huahua collaborates was once required by the government to plant broad beans. Broad beans require processing before they can be sold and have low demand within the ecological circle, so Huahua planted them reluctantly. By chance, the market price for broad beans was high that year, selling for five or six yuan per catty. By selling them on the conventional market, Huahua made over 20,000 yuan—all of which went towards covering the losses of other crops that year.
Among the farmers of Gansu, the unpredictability of prices is most evident in onions: the investment per mu is several thousand yuan, with a yield of nearly 10,000 catties. When the purchase price reaches 50 to 60 cents per catty, a single mu can earn one to two thousand yuan.
But there are also times when there are no buyers or prices plummet: when the price drops below 20 cents, a bumper harvest year becomes a bankruptcy year. On short-video apps, farmers from Gansu and Henan frequently share videos of onions rotting in the fields. “But you don’t see how much they make when they actually win, do you?” Huahua points out.
Farmers who grow onions are like gamblers. But in truth, the fate of most crops is much the same.
Consequently, some farmers believe that given so many uncontrollable variables, rather than gambling with the market, it is better to let Heaven decide their fate.
At the Tianzhu base, Huahua grows chickpeas and flaxseed, and rotates them with potatoes and buckwheat. We discovered that beneath a layer of robust, lush buckwheat, there was a hidden layer of potato sprouts. This had originally been a plot of potato land, carefully sown and covered with plastic film this year. However, seeds from last year’s fallen buckwheat had scattered across the ground and taken over, and now the wild-growing buckwheat had already surpassed the manually planted potatoes in growth.
“Why not just harvest the buckwheat instead?” we asked.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Huahua replied.
“Another ‘new harvest’ then,” he remarked, his tone caught somewhere between bitterness and optimism.
V. Chronicles of a Rugged Northwest Man
He described the most common wild animal on the Northwest grasslands—the marmot—as “the one in the memes that goes ‘aaah!'” He practically mimicked the mouth shape and expression.
Then there was the honey badger that had just run into the chicken coop—a wild animal not commonly seen locally. “It had a chicken in its mouth and a belly all soft, just like mine. It just strutted right past me, no respect at all!”
His family recalls that Huahua was bright, but after attending a private high school with a poor atmosphere, he lost interest in his studies and ran off to Xinjiang to work. He eventually got into a second-tier university, later taking a leave of absence to participate in rural reconstruction and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) projects. In 2018, his public account would repost articles discussing ecological issues in sandy soil cultivation; today, he remains steadfast in his fundamental principle of planting without pesticides or fertilisers.
Huahua admits that in the past, he often acted on impulse, reckless and muddled. When he returned to the village in 2016, he once kept five or six dogs, describing himself as something of a “gang leader”: every time he stepped out, the pack followed in a grand procession, and he felt “exceptionally powerful”.
He loved to explore and venture out. Whenever he came across a turning he hadn’t taken, he felt compelled to follow it to the very end to see what was there. He knew almost every nook and cranny of the towns and villages near his home.
But as he entered his forties, he truly wanted to “settle down” and prove to his family that his ecological farming was a reliable, promising, and “proper” pursuit. He “dismissed” his pack of dogs, leaving only two to guard the noodle factory.
Shitou took over the account books from Huahua; every cent spent on agricultural supplies and every purchase had to be recorded clearly. Huahua’s “grand” new ideas (during our visit, he was negotiating noodle vinegar processing with a local high-end vinegar producer) were not always “approved”. Occasionally, he felt tempted to secretly expand his planting behind Shitou’s back, but more often than not, he reflected that having such a wonderful wife had finally brought him peace of mind.
In the early hours of 22 September, Shitou gave birth to a son; both mother and child are doing well. There were now more expenses for the household to cover. After the National Day holiday, it would be up to Huahua himself to harvest the chickpeas grown by Tianzhu.
Unless otherwise stated, all photos in this article were taken by the author
Editor: Tianle