Why Small-Scale Farmers Are Reluctant to Grow Greenhouse Vegetables?
Thriving industries form a vital foundation for rural revitalisation. Perhaps inspired by Shouguang in Shandong, the primary focus for agricultural development in rural areas across central and western China has often been the promotion of greenhouse vegetable cultivation. Gong County (a pseudonym) in the central region exemplifies this trend.
A few years ago, during the targeted poverty alleviation campaign, the Gong County government sought to swiftly improve farmers’ livelihoods by introducing greenhouse vegetables, known for their strong market returns. Subsidy policies were rolled out in an effort to embed greenhouse vegetable production into the existing livelihood structures of local farming communities.
With the government supplying greenhouses, seedlings, and technical guidance entirely free of charge, what precisely accounted for their reluctant uptake of greenhouse vegetable farming?
I. Land Transfer or Land Grab?
The complication is that Gong County lies within a hilly and low-mountain region. With roughly two million mu of mountainous land, flat and open terrain is scarce. Developing a greenhouse vegetable industry here requires considerable upfront investment. Land must be transferred, and farmers’ fragmented plots consolidated and levelled into contiguous fields. Furthermore, water, electricity, and road infrastructure must be installed to facilitate the delivery of agricultural inputs and the transport of produce.
The consequence of this shift is that paddy fields once used for rice and white lotus have been converted to dry land. The area’s diverse topography has been flattened and consolidated into uniform plots, forcing a sharp decline in the cultivation of Chen Village’s traditional rice, white lotus, and even tobacco. The scarce arable land that was flat, well-drained, and easily accessible has been entirely taken over by greenhouse vegetable production.
However, due to overly rapid expansion, coupled with rising land rents and labour costs, the enterprises could only sustain operations across 800 mu of greenhouses. Of Chen Village’s remaining 1,200 mu, 200 mu were returned to farmers rent-free in line with policy requirements. Another 600 mu were leased to professional tenant farmers brought in from Guizhou, Hunan, and elsewhere under a rent-back and lease-out arrangement, who grow strawberries, leafy greens, watermelons, and other crops. The final 400 mu have lain fallow for two consecutive years.
If the original intention behind land transfer policies was to improve resource efficiency, the Chen Village case clearly falls short of delivering on that promise.
II. High Investment Costs After Subsidies Phase Out
To help the greenhouse vegetable sector take hold, the government has built on its high-standard farmland consolidation initiatives to actively attract industrial and commercial capital for the construction of connected steel-frame greenhouses. A subsidy covering 50 per cent of the construction cost per mu is provided.
The government also stipulated that once the greenhouses are built, enterprises must prioritise hiring local households living in poverty for greenhouse work. Those impoverished families with a keen interest in farming are granted rent-free use of the facilities.
Buoyed by these favourable policies, Chen Guilin, a 43-year-old villager from Chen Village, recognised the commercial potential of greenhouse vegetables. Following the Spring Festival in 2018, he and his wife decided to give up working away from home. Taking advantage of a half-rent initiative, they leased four connected vegetable greenhouses from the enterprise, focusing mainly on aubergines, chillies, and similar crops.
However, Chen Guilin soon realised that cultivating vegetables in commercial greenhouses is far from as straightforward as tending a home allotment. The outlay for pesticides, seedlings, chemical fertilisers, agricultural plastic film, irrigation, and labour proved excessively high. Although the greenhouses boosted yields, the scale of operation still fell short of corporate benchmarks. Consequently, he was forced to rely on high-volume, low-margin sales, offloading the produce through the enterprise’s distribution channels.
By the end of 2020, as the national poverty-alleviation drive drew to a close, there were further changes in the officials spearheading the greenhouse vegetable initiative. Existing subsidy schemes were trimmed, while greenhouse rental costs climbed. Struggling to sustain such a capital-intensive model, numerous vegetable enterprises found themselves unable to keep going. Deeming the venture no longer economically viable, Chen Guilin and his wife abandoned greenhouse farming and returned to migrant work.
Three: The ‘Invisible Wall’ of Technology
Before greenhouse vegetable farming took off in Gong County, the region’s fields were predominantly devoted to crops like tobacco and potatoes. Yet farmers leasing greenhouses typically grew eggplants. Because eggplants, like tobacco and potatoes, belong to the nightshade family, they cannot be integrated into a standard crop rotation with them. Moreover, soils previously used for tobacco or potatoes require additional disinfection before eggplant seedlings can be set. The open-field cultivation experience honed under the traditional agricultural system proved largely irrelevant inside a greenhouse.
In theory, the relative enclosure of a greenhouse allows growers to manage every stage of a vegetable’s growth cycle. By fine-tuning temperature, humidity, light, and irrigation and fertilisation, they can shield crops from the vagaries of nature.
Yet knowing precisely when to raise the temperature or humidity, and how to regulate these conditions using ventilation and heating systems, rests entirely on the farmer’s own skill and experience.
Take eggplants as an example. They thrive in warmth, requiring high nighttime temperatures during the transplanting phase. They also crave sunlight: to push an out-of-season harvest, growers must draw back shade cloths promptly by day and close them at night, while running heating fans to maintain the desired temperature. Eggplants are thirsty once they begin fruiting, requiring irrigation several times more frequently than usual. Yet a single heavy watering can easily waterlog and rot the roots and foliage, making diligent ventilation crucial. During the flowering and fruit-setting stages, growers must also prune excess side shoots beneath the lowest fruit, removing diseased, yellowing, or ageing foliage, as well as misshapen or diseased fruit, to ensure good air circulation and light penetration and prevent unnecessary nutrient drain.
Taken together, these examples illustrate that the day-to-day precision management of irrigation, fertilisation, light, and pest control in greenhouse farming represents an entirely new body of knowledge and operational practice. Farmers must dedicate substantial time, effort, and labour to these tasks to secure any meaningful yield or profit.
This technical hurdle acts as an invisible ‘wall’, drawing a clear line between those who work inside the greenhouse and those who do not.
Chen Chengren, a 45-year-old farmer from Chen Village, reflects with quiet resignation: “At my age, I’m still capable of tackling more demanding crops like eggplants and peppers, which require a higher level of technical know-how. But at sixty, like my father, you’re simply too old. You can’t keep up physically, and the technical learning curve is too steep.”
Yet across central regions like Gong County, the farming population remaining in the villages consists largely of those over sixty, much like Chen Chengren’s father. Motivated by a deep-seated aversion to financial loss, they prefer sticking to open-field crops they know well, or erecting basic greenhouse covers for winter cultivation. By growing smaller quantities and selling them piecemeal at local markets, they may be operating on a modest scale, but at least they sidestep significant financial risk.
Four: The Challenge of Hiring Labour
Securing suitable labour, however, presents another thorny challenge.
Around 85 per cent of young people in Gong County have migrated to coastal regions for work. The labour force remaining in the villages falls well short of the high-intensity, fast-paced demands of greenhouse cultivation, whether in terms of age, skills, or physical stamina.
As Huang Jinchun, a township cadre stationed in Zhu Village, explained: “The majority of rural labour still heads out to work elsewhere. Enterprises frequently face staffing shortages. Some workers turn down jobs due to low wages and strict oversight, while others find the greenhouse atmosphere stifling. Employers have tried various approaches, such as hiring younger workers, but even they often lack the necessary competence. You need people who are both technically skilled and capable of managing others. Locals are accustomed to a more relaxed pace and prove difficult to supervise. Older women, in particular, often ignore instructions. For instance, aubergines and chillies require pruning according to strict technical standards. Yet when asked to prune, farmers hesitate, worrying it will damage the young plants. Traditional farming mindsets clash with modern, scientific methods. They may know how to farm traditionally, but they lack the skills for modern cultivation.”
Larger vegetable enterprises are often prepared to pay premium wages to attract workers (daily rates in 2018–2019 were around 100 yuan for men and 90 yuan for women). For smaller-scale growers, this upward pressure on wages means they are frequently forced to rely on family and friends to fill labour gaps. Yet even this informal arrangement can drive up costs, squeezing already narrow profit margins.
Take aubergines, for instance: labour costs alone can reach approximately 3,000 yuan per mu per season. It is no surprise, then, that grower Chen Keli remarked: “You have to endure the hardship yourself if you want to make a profit from vegetables. The big operators can afford to pay high wages for hired hands. We ordinary farmers would rather let the plants wither than take on labour costs.”
Greenhouse vegetable cultivation is by no means devoid of market potential or policy backing. However, due to its exacting demands, it is far better suited to younger and middle-aged farmers who possess a solid financial base, adapt quickly to new technologies, have the stamina for intensive work, and can accurately read market trends.
Clearly, this creates a mismatch with the age profile and skill set of the farming population left behind in Gong County’s rural communities.
Foodthink says
Editor: Ze’en