Hu Ge and Liu Tao Both Came to the Farm — Have the Melons Sold?
In May, I quit my job, left Beijing for a while and headed to Zhiliangtian Eco-Farm in Alxa, Inner Mongolia, to spend two months there. I had not expected that my first month on the farm would involve drinking every single day. Volunteers bought two-thirds of the beer in the farm café, and once it ran out, we would dig out last year’s home-brewed plum wine and drink together well into the night.
Mainly out of frustration.
“Why did you come here?” Countless people had asked me that over the two months, and I had asked myself many times too. The rough, chaotic daily routine before me looked utterly absurd — my days were spent collecting rubbish, scrubbing toilets, cooking rice and making coffee for visitors to the farm. This was so far from what I had originally hoped: to get to know agriculture in Alxa.
Eventually, I settled on a standard reply: “I came here to suffer.”
Before quitting, I had spent seven years as a business journalist. Those years happened to coincide with the wave of internet-driven transformation sweeping through the fresh produce industry. I wrote a great deal of industry news about agriculture and frequently went on field trips to rural areas, encountering fascinating origins and product categories: Fuyuan and cranberries, Yongquan and mandarins, Dujiangyan and kiwifruit …
But over time, these press trips of no more than three days, organised by major internet companies, always settled into a single, narrow logic of the distribution supply chain. Add to that the whole of 2022 — with its repeated shutdowns and shrinking radius of movement — and I began to re-examine my work. The contradictions made me want to escape that sense of stagnation.
In early 2023, I enrolled in Foodthink’s Eco-Agriculture Internship Programme. On the one hand, I hoped to spend a longer period than previous press trips getting to know how an eco-farm actually operates, and to pick up some basic knowledge of agricultural production; on the other, I wanted to seize the chance to visit the Inner Mongolia Plateau — a vast region I had always filled with romantic imaginings.
And so Zhiliangtian in Alxa became the only choice. It was the only farm in Inner Mongolia on Foodthink’s list of host farms for internships, located in Bayanhaote Town, Alxa Left Banner, Alxa League, roughly an hour’s drive from the Helan Mountains.
I. The Melons Are Picked, but the Buyers Still Aren’t
Before setting off, I browsed some of the farm’s WeChat articles and listened to podcast episodes featuring farm owner Ma Yanwei. I learned that behind the concept of “Desert Eco-Melons” lies an idealistic story: Ma Yanwei, a master’s graduate in ecology from Northeast China, had chosen to stay in Alxa and develop water-saving agriculture as a public-interest endeavour.
I wasn’t interested in the feel-good angle — I had heard too many such stories over the years, and there had been even more failures. But this farm had survived for eight years, expanded its cultivated land to 160 mu, and available information suggested that its produce sales had turned a profit and it had built some brand recognition. I set off eager to learn from a success story.
I arrived at Zhiliangtian in July, just as the melon selling season was about to begin. Within days of getting there, I was pulled into a sales meeting, and the very first one gave me a reality check — and sapped my curiosity about the melon business.
The melons in the fields were nearly ready to harvest, and Ma Yanwei had brought in a friend from town who did live-stream commerce to offer sales advice. At the start of the meeting, Ma said, “This year our first priority is to avoid unsold produce as best we can.” Before he could get to his next sentence, his friend cut in: “No, no, no — that’s the most basic requirement. We can’t settle for something this basic. You have to find a way to make a profit. Look, you’ve worked yourself to the bone all year and gone all sun-blackened — and that all has a cost.”
Hearing that exchange, I thought: so the “thin margins” Ma Yanwei kept mentioning on podcasts really weren’t modesty after all! The farm’s sales were far from as smooth as I had imagined — it was still teetering on the edge of survival.
Throughout the meeting, the friend kept offering suggestions. More Douyin live streams, for instance; or getting in touch as soon as possible with local channels that could absorb high-end produce, aiming to build a name in the local market. Inspired by his friend’s advice, Ma spent several days after the meeting dragging two young volunteers from Beijing, both born in the 2000s, out of bed at six in the morning to sell melons on pre-order via Douyin live streams. Unfortunately, each stream drew barely a hundred viewers.
Two weeks later, I was pulled into yet another sales meeting. The moment I stepped into the office, the heavy silence — everyone with a hand to their forehead — was suffocating. Selling really was hard! Much of the work planned at the beginning-of-month meeting had stalled because no one was carrying it out. The daily live streams, for example, had largely stopped after the young volunteers left.
But by now, the melons had been picked on schedule and were piled up in the fields.
The rejection was inevitable: supermarkets and retail chains all have their own procurement processes. Especially in the organic fruit category, retailers tend to agree quantities and price ranges with farms well before the season begins — they don’t scramble at the last minute to source products. On top of that, retailers have their own requirements for appearance, weight standards and pricing, which producers may not be able to meet or accept.
I thought back to two years earlier, when I visited an organic farm that Freshippo partnered with on the outskirts of Beijing. The farm owner was arguing with Freshippo’s buyer about leaves with insect holes, right in front of the media. The farm owner felt Freshippo’s quality standards were rather harsh: leaves with insect holes were precisely proof that no pesticides had been used, yet they failed Freshippo’s inspection and had to be plucked off in bulk, piling up losses for the farm. Freshippo’s buyer, however, insisted that vegetables with poor appearance would dampen customers’ desire to buy. Beyond that, the farm had also made changes to align with Freshippo’s sales rhythm, switching from diversified planting to monoculture — a major concession to the market.
Even farms that have secured a channel like Freshippo still struggle to stay afloat, let alone a farm like Zhiliangtian without a stable sales channel.
II. Expensive Organic Melons: How Do You Get Them to Market?
E-commerce can help a farm connect directly with consumers, but it cannot reduce growing and selling costs — if anything, it makes marketing and logistics even more expensive. Particularly in the current economic climate, even the retail side is chasing value for money, and even Freshippo, once the poster child of the “consumption upgrade,” has pivoted fully to a discount model this year.
I often recall a dialogue about “market positioning” that took place during an online co-learning session between Foodthink interns and farm mentors —
A young person planning to return home to start eco-farming was asking the farm owners in the group about production issues related to yield, when Da Hei from Xi’an Lüwo Farm cut in: “Don’t worry about such fine details for now — production issues are all solvable. You should think first about where your market actually is.”
“Farming actually involves a whole complex set of questions: How do you choose your varieties? Are you going to sell primary agricultural products or processed foods? How will you handle branding and marketing? How do you position yourself in the market? All of these need to be thought through in advance. Yield is just the baseline. After all, we have to compete in the market. In the early days you can rely on your circle, but once the farm matures, you still have to grapple with these questions,” said Da Hei, who had already built a biscuit-processing workshop on his farm and sells biscuits through several established channels.
Zhiliangtian, too, is at this post-maturity stage of commercialisation. In the early years, Ma Yanwei had opened up the melon market through his public-interest story and personal connections. But as the audience expanded further and, in recent years, melon production has gone into overcapacity, the business has become increasingly difficult. In 2022, adverse weather led to losses and unsold stock on the farm. This year, to mitigate risk, the farm deliberately cut its melon planting area by nearly half — yet sales still left everyone feeling gloomy.
The farm grows three varieties of melon — Jinhongbao, Xizhoumi and Baiyindi. Although they ripen at staggered intervals, they can only be sold for barely more than a month at most, and their shelf life isn’t all that long. Retailers can source melons at various stages of maturity from across the country to ensure a summer-long supply, but a single farm simply cannot achieve a harvest that spans the entire summer.
In 2023, with rising costs across the board — land rent and everything else — the per-box cost of melons went up by another 10 yuan. The retail price of a single melon, delivered free, was already approaching 50 yuan. Every time we sliced open a melon brought back from the fields, I couldn’t resist joking: “I could never afford to buy these.” It wasn’t a price the mass market would accept. In the local market, non-organic melons sell for just a few jiao per jin, so the farm’s organic melons have no competitiveness whatsoever in the local wholesale market.
III. High Logistics and Labour Costs in the Desert
By late July, all the volunteers were rounded up to help transport and pack melons in the fields. It wasn’t until later that I realised this was the only time in my two-month internship that I had truly taken part in any farm work.
On 28 July, Typhoon Doksuri made landfall in Fujian. By that evening, the moisture it had swept up from the Pacific reached the Helan Mountains. Towering cumulus clouds piled up on the eastern side beyond the range, glowing red in the sunset along the horizon. The evening sky that day was beautiful, and those towering cumulus clouds kept building on the eastern flank of the Helan Mountains for days on end. But Ma said, “You’ve all been gazing at the clouds over the Helan Mountains these past few days thinking it’s romantic — I don’t find it romantic at all.”
After the typhoon made landfall, weather forecasts warned of continuous rainfall in Alxa Left Banner over the coming week. By then, the farm’s melons had entered their sales season, and ripe melons still in the ground fear rain above all else. Rainfall causes melons to split open, rendering them unsellable. In 2022, the farm had already suffered such losses. This year, learning from that experience, the farm began a rush harvest on 30 July, racing to pick and pack the melons before the rain arrived and stacking them up at the farm.
That batch was for pre-orders placed by the farm’s membership customers. We sat under the trees, forming an assembly line: someone folding packing cartons, someone weighing, someone inflating the air column bags for impact protection, someone stuffing melons into them.
The air column bags kept bursting with loud pops and cracks, and someone remarked that the sound reminded them of firecrackers for Chinese New Year.
Ma Yanwei was weighing melons as he went and said with a smile, “Listen to that sound — can you guess what I’m thinking?”
I answered: “How much does it cost when one air column bag bursts?”
Ma said I had got it right: “Half a yuan.”
Each box holds two melons, so we need at least two air column bags per box. Even leaving aside the waste from packaging materials, the logistics cost of shipping one box of melons plus the cost of protective packaging comes to nearly 20 yuan.
Melons are not an ideal product category for e-commerce either. They are not climacteric fruits like kiwifruit, which can be picked early and kept in cold storage for extended periods, nor do they command the high unit value of fruits like cherries or blueberries. The moment when a melon reaches its peak maturity and flavour is also the moment it is least suited to long-distance transport.
Given these characteristics, selling melons to distant markets while preserving their flavour demands close coordination between the farm and its sales and logistics partners. Clearly, the farm was not yet prepared for this.
Another high cost is labour — Alxa is a place where retaining talent is an ongoing challenge.
All through July, I could tell Ma had gathered plenty of ideas from friends far and wide, but once it came to execution, things either devolved into a frantic scramble or simply petered out.
More often than not, I felt that what the farm lacked most was a stable team of executors. For instance, we need full-time staff dedicated to building and maintaining sales channel relationships, to brand management and product marketing, to quality control aligned with production … all of these are year-round activities. But the farm has only five full-time employees, each stretched to breaking point, and the volunteers who arrive each year like migratory birds can only lend limited help.
People are the most expensive resource in Alxa. Captain Zhao, who oversees production at the farm, said, “If you want to get anything done here in Alxa, you simply can’t do it without money.” Wages in the rural areas here are on a par with those in the coastal regions. During peak farming season, field workers earn 200 yuan a day.
In fact, even Ma himself acknowledged that once all costs including labour are factored in, along with the risk of unsold stock, melons — the farm’s flagship product — have been running at a loss for years.
IV. Volunteers Thrown In at the Deep End
Faced with such a long list of duties, many people simply did what felt right. I could understand that, but I could never tolerate anyone being careless in the kitchen — especially when my turn came immediately after an unreliable team. Walking into the kitchen the next morning would infuriate you: the previous day’s food waste still sitting in the bins, never tipped into the compost pit; pots left unwashed from the night before, pooling water in the sink; leftovers spread across the kitchen counters, attracting flies far more industrious than any volunteer overnight.
Someone who never wanted to be a teacher found herself helping manage a study tour group of around twenty people; someone who could barely cook had to rack her brains on duty days to produce a meal that would fill twenty-something stomachs. The first time it was my turn to cook, I texted my flatmate in Beijing: “I have to make dinner for seventeen people tonight!” She replied: “I have exactly one expectation of you: enough of it, and cooked through.”
After many dinners, I sat outside, gazing at the distant sunset, a beer in hand, quietly digesting my own absurdity.
But the unforeseen absurdity was only part of it. More often than not, this place gave me experiences I will never forget — otherwise there would be no diligent internship summary like this one. For much of my remaining time on the farm, I took over running the café, encountered all manner of unexpected stories, and met people and situations that helped me gradually understand why some are willing to stay in this desolate land. Tomorrow, I will go on telling the stories of what I encountered on the farm.
To date, two recruitment rounds have been completed, supporting over forty participants across more than ten eco-farms nationwide for internships ranging from two months to one year. Participants in the second round will “graduate” by the end of 2023, and the third round will open for public applications in January 2024! Do keep following Foodthink’s “Eco-Agriculture Internship” programme!
Editor: Xiong Yi