Vegetable Prices Keep Rising — Have the Farmers Benefited? | Food Talk Vol. 43

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This year, whether in the city or the countryside, everyone is talking about how expensive vegetables have become.

Yet while we grumble about rising prices, the farmers out in the fields are facing challenges unlike anything they have seen before — and few people stop to ask: why are vegetable prices climbing like this, and have the farmers actually earned more money from it (or lost even more)?

In fact, behind the rise in vegetable prices lies, perhaps, a story about climate change.

In this episode of Food Talk, we bring together three farmers from Beijing and Yunnan: Wenzizi, a nature educator practising a “Half Farmer, Half X” life in Beijing; Liu Gang, who farms on the outskirts of the capital; and Kang Li, a young woman who returned to her hometown in Yunnan. Together, they take us on a deep conversation about farmland, vegetable prices, and extreme weather.

What we found is this: as climate change gradually moves from the news headlines into our shopping baskets, farmers have become the frontline witnesses:

■ From violent storms that smashed apricot trees to devastating droughts that cracked reservoir floors, their stories reveal how agriculture finds a way to survive the shocks of climate change;

■ Liu Gang shares how he has eased the impact of extreme weather by growing taro and digging drainage ditches;

■ Kang Li takes us inside an ecological orchard in Yunnan to explore how grass ground cover helps protect the health of fruit trees;

■ Wenzizi uses a comedy-duo-style humour to unpack the science behind “why the bean plants refuse to flower”.

This episode also goes straight to the truth behind “vegetable price fluctuations”:

■ Why can’t the farmers make money, while consumers feel that vegetables keep getting pricier?

■ How can ecological agriculture offer a possible answer to climate change?

■ Will vegetable prices keep rising?

Through this episode, we hope our listeners will come to understand how climate change shapes both our vegetable baskets and our agriculture, see the effort and resilience of farming communities, and reconsider what we, as consumers, can do to support a healthier and more sustainable farming future.

Come and join us in this wonderful conversation about the land, the garden, and what lies ahead!

This Episode’s Guests

Zhang Hehe (nature name: Wenzizi)

Principal of Friends of Nature · Gaia Nature School and co-author of Earthy, Never Dowdy. She graduated from the Department of Biology at Capital Normal University, then went to Norway to pursue a Master’s degree in Environment and Development. With twenty years of experience in environmental education, she has won the adoration of children through her wealth of biological knowledge and her clear, engaging explanations. She currently runs Gaia Wosi Garden, where she combines ecological agricultural production with conservation, using environmental education to rebuild the connection between people, nature, and the land.

 

 

Liu Gang

Born in the 1960s, he spent many years working for Japanese companies. But he longed for a career free of a “glass ceiling”, one that wouldn’t leave him vulnerable to redundancy and that he could keep going with until he was eighty. After teaching himself organic agriculture over several years, he founded “Little Willow Farm” in Shunyi, Beijing, in 2013, dedicated to producing safe, wholesome, delicious, and environmentally friendly organic vegetables and produce.

 

 

 

Kang Li

A young Yi woman born in 1992, she returned to her hometown in Chuxiong, Yunnan, where she founded “Happy Home Farm” and a cooperative. At the end of 2015, she and her husband left Beijing together to start their enterprise back in Chuxiong. Passionate about agriculture and fond of rural life, she decided to put down roots in the countryside for the rest of her life. In the nine years since, she has organised local cooperatives, brought Yi women together to establish a Yi Embroidery Association, helped small-scale farmers carry out sustainable harvesting of wild mountain produce, built sales channels and platforms for local specialities, and campaigned in the village to reduce the use of pesticides, chemical fertilisers, and herbicides, and to preserve as many heritage seed varieties as possible.

 

 

This Episode’s Hosts

Tianle

Founding editor of Foodthink and convenor of the Beijing Organic Farmers Market.

 

 

 

 

This episode of the podcast has been edited from a conversation at the Gaia People’s Mutual Aid Conference (abbreviated as “Gaibang Conference”) held on 13 November 2024.

Timeline

00:29 Guest introductions: Liu Gang from Beijing, Kang Li from Yunnan, and Wenzizi, who practises a “Half Farmer, Half X” life.

02:28 The power of climate: how extreme weather affects crops — real stories of hail, downpours and drought.

15:16 The shock of extreme weather on production costs: from investing in growing equipment to building soil resilience. How much money and how much worry does extreme weather cost our farming friends?

20:40 If extreme weather has such a huge impact, why haven’t many small-scale ecological farmers raised their vegetable prices?

24:08 The mystery of vegetable prices: prices go up, but farmers don’t earn more? Hear our farming friends’ frustration and perseverance.

29:20 The opportunity in ecological agriculture: the “unbeatable” approach — how healthy soil and diverse planting reduce climate losses.

45:16 The power of the consumer: it all sounds good, but would you buy ugly “open-field vegetables”? How do consumer choices shape the future of farming?

53:14 Will vegetable prices keep rising? Facing the climate challenge, our farming friends discuss the pricing and future of ecological produce.

Wenzizi’s hand-drawn panorama of Gaia Wosi Garden, with its mountains, fields, woodland, garden and dwelling all in place. Image source: Earthy, Never Dowdy.
Left: the great mulberry tree guarding the homestead entrance was still luxuriantly full even in late October. Right: Changjiaoling (left), Wenzizi (right) and their ever free-spirited, cheerful dog.

On 12 June 2022, Wenzizi experienced an unprecedented hailstorm at Gaia Wosi Garden in Pinggu, Beijing. The apricots in the orchard were perfectly ripe — they had been about to make apricot jam over the next couple of days — when the hail wiped them all out. The vegetables in the fields were flattened from 3D to 2D, and the spring-crop vegetables were almost entirely destroyed. Beyond the crops themselves, the farmhouse and farm infrastructure were not spared either: polytunnels were punctured by the hail, and even some roof tiles on the farmhouse were cracked. The hailstones were the size of eggs — a first in Wenzizi’s forty years of life. Scenes reminiscent of the film The Day After Tomorrow made her realise that extreme weather driven by climate change may increasingly take on a catastrophic character. As someone who grows and eats her own food, she has felt, in recent years, the impact of climate change on crop growth more keenly than ever.
Weather forecasts and meteorological data often cannot accurately predict or report conditions for a single area. As a nature educator, Wenzizi uses data from the farm’s own weather station to keep precise records, and she has noticed that the weather is growing ever more unpredictable. This year, a single downpour at Gaia Wosi Garden broke a ten-year record, with more than 180 millimetres of rain in twenty-four hours. Several successive heavy showers disrupted the sowing of autumn-crop vegetables; carrots had to be resown at least three times before a few finally survived.
Little Willow Farm, known for its meticulous management, would normally schedule every season’s planting with great precision to ensure that more than twenty varieties are in harvest at any time of year, offering consumers and restaurants a wide enough choice. But the abnormal weather of the past two years has repeatedly caught it off guard.

Since this past summer, Liu Gang’s WeChat Moments have been almost entirely about the weather — tinged with disappointment, but more often brimming with optimism and resilience.
Xiaozhiju Village, Zhonghe Town, Yongren County, Chuxiong, Yunnan. The hilltop where Kang Li’s family lives is home to just a few households; the village’s 100-plus residents are scattered across different hilltops, and a visit to the neighbours takes over half an hour’s walk. Photo: Xiaoyunsheng
By selling local mountain produce directly to consumers, Kang Li’s family has settled happily back home and brought two children into the world. Though she has found that ecological agriculture shows a degree of resilience in adapting to climate change, she has also seen more ordinary farmers fall into hardship because of extreme weather.
Kang Li has found that ecological walnut orchards, where no herbicide is used beneath the canopy, prove more resilient in dry spells and yield better harvests than conventional orchards.

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Podcast Production Team

Show music: Banong

Production: Xiaojing

Planning: Tianle

Editing: ZX, Tianle

Contact: xiaojing@foodthink.cn

 

Published by Foodthink