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The new wave farmers
By Yang Lan
Idealistic entrepreneurs bring a different approach to traditional crops
The Farmer 4 organization founders (from left) Chen Tongkui, Liu Jingwen, Zhao Yi and Zhong Wenbin at an event in Shanghai in September Photo: Courtesy of Chen Tongkui
Chinese parents used to tell their children to study hard, go to university, move to a city. "Otherwise you will have to stay at home and be farmers like us." Over the years millions of young Chinese did just that and studied, left their hometowns and went to work in cities. Migrant workers left their children and parents in countryside villages, and abandoned their homes and farmlands.
Today some young people are trying to reverse this pattern - they are leaving cities and heading to live and thrive in the countryside.
Five years ago, Chen Tongkui was a senior reporter working on the South Reviews magazine in Shanghai. Now he runs a teahouse in Shanghai and grows lychees in Hainan Province.
In September 2009, on assignment as a reporter, Chen visited the Tao-Mi Eco-Village in Taiwan. There he saw ways of rebuilding the community by developing agriculture, promoting tourism and improving the environment. Wanting to do something for his hometown, Boxue village, an antique village near a volcano in Hainan Province, Chen went home in November 2009.
Serious problemsChen believes that Chinese farmers face serious problems. On the one hand, food safety and contamination incidents have lowered public confidence in domestic produce. On the other hand, farmers are not earning much more annually despite a growth in production levels.
"Take the lychee gardens in our village as an example - with help from the government we solved the problem of irrigation. With the development of fresh food online retailers, sales have increased considerably. We had good results last year and this year. However, everyone in the village has now begun to grow lychees. In one or two years we will be oversupplied," said Chen.
To improve the quality of the lychees, Chen set strict rules for the lychee growers he works with in his village and fertilizer and herbicides are prohibited. He helps the growers reduce the need for herbicide by using plastic bags that wrap and enclose the lychees and prevent pests and pollution. With these techniques, the Boxue village lychees have won a reputation as delicious, safe and eco-friendly.
Selling their product also now involves sophisticated methods. Chen and his team use brand marketing, events and online promotions to boost the sales of the lychees. Most of the village lychees are sold through online retailers.
"We are not only helping the growers sell their products to the city, but we are also helping rebuild the community," Chen told the Global Times.
As he began growing and selling lychees, Chen started turning Boxue village into an eco-village. "First we built an eco-friendly hostel and called it the World of Bubinga. It attracts people from different countries and regions. They come and live in the hostel for days, or even months and bring their wisdom and experience to our little village."
Sharing experiencesIn June 2010, a group from the Tao-Mi Eco-Village visited Boxue village. They shared their experiences of building the eco-village and running hostels. Later on, the Boxue village growers visited Tao-Mi in Taiwan to study their community building and then a group of South Korean artists visited and villagers joined in some of their projects.
With the ideas and experience of some of these outsiders, the Boxue villagers started to adopt different approaches to the development of the village.
But Chen realized that it was not enough to build just one village and sell lychees. He felt that only when the majority of consumers and growers had reached conformity on food safety and health precautions could the distrust and conflicts be resolved. Only then would Chinese farmers regain their standing.
Alongside some partners last year Chen opened his Your Home teahouse in Shanghai. It is not making a profit and Chen doesn't see it making a profit this year or the next. But Chen and his friends did not plan for the teahouse to make them a fortune. They use it as a promotional platform, organizing events there like lychee tastings and nights where visitors can learn about organic food and eco-friendly agriculture. Some of their products cost more but many consumers are willing to spend extra to buy quality organic products and support eco-friendly producers.
Moving constantly between a farm life and a city life, Chen is trying to change both ends of the agricultural business. He is educating producers to adopt better and safer methods of cultivation and pushing the organic produce concept among city dwellers.
When five visitors to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region tasted some dried fruits in the home of a Kashgar farmer, one day they were struck by how fresh and delicious they were. But the local farmers they had been visiting had all complained about how their income had dropped as a result of falling sales.
The group decided there and then to do something to help the producers of this high-quality food and in March 2012 leader, Liu Jingwen, founded the Vizdan organization (in the Uyghur language "Vizdan" means right-minded).
Vizdan was set up to help the local farmers of Xinjiang sell their produce online and it has had unexpected assistance from other people of the area. Like Li Yumeng who now drives the team truck and has already logged more than 60,000 kilometers driving it through Xinjiang.
Until he was 6 years old Li was raised in Hami, Xinjiang, but then moved with his parents to Hefei in Anhui Province. He had settled in Guangzhou and had a steady job when he read about Vizdan on Sina Weibo. That changed his life. He decided he wanted to be a part of this scheme and joined the team as its lead driver in Xinjiang.
More than a driverHe is now much more than a driver - he often helps load the truck and is the Vizdan photographer, shooting pictures of the products and the farmers for marketing campaigns.
Li once dreamed of the white poplar trees that thrive in his part of Xinjiang along with the baked buns. Today he sees the trees every day and enjoys buns whenever he wants to. His parents were upset that he left his steady job but are supporting him in this new venture.
Nowadays Vizdan is helping more than 2,000 farmers in Xinjiang sell their produce and has increased their annual incomes by some 20 percent, according to a report in the China Youth Daily.
The website gongyi.net reports that Vizdan has created profiles of the farmers and each individual product. Its products have to be certified as organically grown and guaranteed as coming from the area stated and to be safe for consumers.
Like Liu Jingwen, Zhao Yi sells eco-friendly tea from Fujian, Taiwan and Zhejiang under his Earth & People brand. Unlike Liu, Zhao doesn't just buy tea from tea growers - he wants his growers to become part of the marketing campaigns. His growers have their names published on each packet of tea they produce. With every packet of tea sent to consumers comes a profile of the grower.
These teas have to have passed tests for heavy metal and pesticide residues administered by SGS, a leading international verification, testing and certification group.
Confident in his products Zhao welcomes visitors or inspection teams into his tea plantations at any time. "I want to change people's prejudices against farmers. By doing this I hope to help farmers regain their stature."
Three championsAt a recent meeting in June 2014 these three champions of new style farming met. The forum, Xin Nong Tang (the New Farmers Forum), was organized by Zhong Wenbin and it was here that Chen Tongkui, Zhao Yi and Liu Jingwen got to meet each other and exchange ideas.
Through its WeChat account, forums and conferences, the Xin Nong Tang forum has linked thousands of farmers around China. It collects information about products and helps farmers find business partners and sales channels. Its forums and conferences help farmers share ideas, methods and business models.
Aiming to become the best training platform in China for new farmers, Xin Nong Tang has already presented forums in Hangzhou, Beijing, Fujian, Sichuan and Shanghai which have attracted hundreds of farmers and people from the agricultural industry.
After talking to each other and exchanging ideas the four young entrepreneurs launched their own group, Farmer 4, and at a recent event in Shanghai where they told their stories and talked about their approaches to new farming, almost 1,000 people attended, keen to learn about the way they are bringing new life to the countryside. Other events will be presented in Beijing, Hangzhou and Shenzhen.
Chen said: "If you are doing the right thing, and you begin well you can change thousands of people in society. Then they will help you achieve your goal."
By Yang Lan
Idealistic entrepreneurs bring a different approach to traditional crops
The Farmer 4 organization founders (from left) Chen Tongkui, Liu Jingwen, Zhao Yi and Zhong Wenbin at an event in Shanghai in September Photo: Courtesy of Chen Tongkui
Chinese parents used to tell their children to study hard, go to university, move to a city. "Otherwise you will have to stay at home and be farmers like us." Over the years millions of young Chinese did just that and studied, left their hometowns and went to work in cities. Migrant workers left their children and parents in countryside villages, and abandoned their homes and farmlands.
Today some young people are trying to reverse this pattern - they are leaving cities and heading to live and thrive in the countryside.
Five years ago, Chen Tongkui was a senior reporter working on the South Reviews magazine in Shanghai. Now he runs a teahouse in Shanghai and grows lychees in Hainan Province.
In September 2009, on assignment as a reporter, Chen visited the Tao-Mi Eco-Village in Taiwan. There he saw ways of rebuilding the community by developing agriculture, promoting tourism and improving the environment. Wanting to do something for his hometown, Boxue village, an antique village near a volcano in Hainan Province, Chen went home in November 2009.
Serious problemsChen believes that Chinese farmers face serious problems. On the one hand, food safety and contamination incidents have lowered public confidence in domestic produce. On the other hand, farmers are not earning much more annually despite a growth in production levels.
"Take the lychee gardens in our village as an example - with help from the government we solved the problem of irrigation. With the development of fresh food online retailers, sales have increased considerably. We had good results last year and this year. However, everyone in the village has now begun to grow lychees. In one or two years we will be oversupplied," said Chen.
To improve the quality of the lychees, Chen set strict rules for the lychee growers he works with in his village and fertilizer and herbicides are prohibited. He helps the growers reduce the need for herbicide by using plastic bags that wrap and enclose the lychees and prevent pests and pollution. With these techniques, the Boxue village lychees have won a reputation as delicious, safe and eco-friendly.
Selling their product also now involves sophisticated methods. Chen and his team use brand marketing, events and online promotions to boost the sales of the lychees. Most of the village lychees are sold through online retailers.
"We are not only helping the growers sell their products to the city, but we are also helping rebuild the community," Chen told the Global Times.
As he began growing and selling lychees, Chen started turning Boxue village into an eco-village. "First we built an eco-friendly hostel and called it the World of Bubinga. It attracts people from different countries and regions. They come and live in the hostel for days, or even months and bring their wisdom and experience to our little village."
Sharing experiencesIn June 2010, a group from the Tao-Mi Eco-Village visited Boxue village. They shared their experiences of building the eco-village and running hostels. Later on, the Boxue village growers visited Tao-Mi in Taiwan to study their community building and then a group of South Korean artists visited and villagers joined in some of their projects.
With the ideas and experience of some of these outsiders, the Boxue villagers started to adopt different approaches to the development of the village.
But Chen realized that it was not enough to build just one village and sell lychees. He felt that only when the majority of consumers and growers had reached conformity on food safety and health precautions could the distrust and conflicts be resolved. Only then would Chinese farmers regain their standing.
Alongside some partners last year Chen opened his Your Home teahouse in Shanghai. It is not making a profit and Chen doesn't see it making a profit this year or the next. But Chen and his friends did not plan for the teahouse to make them a fortune. They use it as a promotional platform, organizing events there like lychee tastings and nights where visitors can learn about organic food and eco-friendly agriculture. Some of their products cost more but many consumers are willing to spend extra to buy quality organic products and support eco-friendly producers.
Moving constantly between a farm life and a city life, Chen is trying to change both ends of the agricultural business. He is educating producers to adopt better and safer methods of cultivation and pushing the organic produce concept among city dwellers.
When five visitors to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region tasted some dried fruits in the home of a Kashgar farmer, one day they were struck by how fresh and delicious they were. But the local farmers they had been visiting had all complained about how their income had dropped as a result of falling sales.
The group decided there and then to do something to help the producers of this high-quality food and in March 2012 leader, Liu Jingwen, founded the Vizdan organization (in the Uyghur language "Vizdan" means right-minded).
Vizdan was set up to help the local farmers of Xinjiang sell their produce online and it has had unexpected assistance from other people of the area. Like Li Yumeng who now drives the team truck and has already logged more than 60,000 kilometers driving it through Xinjiang.
Until he was 6 years old Li was raised in Hami, Xinjiang, but then moved with his parents to Hefei in Anhui Province. He had settled in Guangzhou and had a steady job when he read about Vizdan on Sina Weibo. That changed his life. He decided he wanted to be a part of this scheme and joined the team as its lead driver in Xinjiang.
More than a driverHe is now much more than a driver - he often helps load the truck and is the Vizdan photographer, shooting pictures of the products and the farmers for marketing campaigns.
Li once dreamed of the white poplar trees that thrive in his part of Xinjiang along with the baked buns. Today he sees the trees every day and enjoys buns whenever he wants to. His parents were upset that he left his steady job but are supporting him in this new venture.
Nowadays Vizdan is helping more than 2,000 farmers in Xinjiang sell their produce and has increased their annual incomes by some 20 percent, according to a report in the China Youth Daily.
The website gongyi.net reports that Vizdan has created profiles of the farmers and each individual product. Its products have to be certified as organically grown and guaranteed as coming from the area stated and to be safe for consumers.
Like Liu Jingwen, Zhao Yi sells eco-friendly tea from Fujian, Taiwan and Zhejiang under his Earth & People brand. Unlike Liu, Zhao doesn't just buy tea from tea growers - he wants his growers to become part of the marketing campaigns. His growers have their names published on each packet of tea they produce. With every packet of tea sent to consumers comes a profile of the grower.
These teas have to have passed tests for heavy metal and pesticide residues administered by SGS, a leading international verification, testing and certification group.
Confident in his products Zhao welcomes visitors or inspection teams into his tea plantations at any time. "I want to change people's prejudices against farmers. By doing this I hope to help farmers regain their stature."
Three championsAt a recent meeting in June 2014 these three champions of new style farming met. The forum, Xin Nong Tang (the New Farmers Forum), was organized by Zhong Wenbin and it was here that Chen Tongkui, Zhao Yi and Liu Jingwen got to meet each other and exchange ideas.
Through its WeChat account, forums and conferences, the Xin Nong Tang forum has linked thousands of farmers around China. It collects information about products and helps farmers find business partners and sales channels. Its forums and conferences help farmers share ideas, methods and business models.
Aiming to become the best training platform in China for new farmers, Xin Nong Tang has already presented forums in Hangzhou, Beijing, Fujian, Sichuan and Shanghai which have attracted hundreds of farmers and people from the agricultural industry.
After talking to each other and exchanging ideas the four young entrepreneurs launched their own group, Farmer 4, and at a recent event in Shanghai where they told their stories and talked about their approaches to new farming, almost 1,000 people attended, keen to learn about the way they are bringing new life to the countryside. Other events will be presented in Beijing, Hangzhou and Shenzhen.
Chen said: "If you are doing the right thing, and you begin well you can change thousands of people in society. Then they will help you achieve your goal."
