We’d been driving for an hour and a half since leaving central Beijing when the car suddenly slowed to a halt. “This isn’t exactly where the GPS told me to go, but I think it’s the place,” says the driver.
I look out the window and see a simple wooden archway leading to a plain, one-storey building. The facade is bare except for some words painted in black capital letters. “Who is your farmer? Where does your food come from?” it reads.
“Yes,” I reply. “This is definitely the place.”
I’ve arrived at Shared Harvest, a 2.6-hectare farm in the countryside 70km north of the capital, to meet Shi Yan, its founder and chief executive. This is one of two Shared Harvest farms; the second is located in Tongzhou, half-an-hour away.
Yan greets me warmly, wearing a knitted green cardigan and long purple scarf. “Sorry I’m late. It’s busy now because of the conference,” she says.
Opened in 2012, Shared Harvest is not only a completely organic farm, it was also one of the first in China to follow the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, where consumers buy meat and vegetables directly from producers. “We painted the question on the building ourselves,” says Yan, “because in CSA, that is the core question.”
A trailblazer in agriculture
Thirty-three-year-old Yan is a trailblazer in Chinese agriculture. As a young student at Beijing’s Renmin University, she was concerned about the widespread environmental damage, such as soil erosion, being caused by chemical-reliant farming practices.
In 2008, she travelled to the US as an intern at Minnesota’s ecological Earthrise Farm and to see CSA in action.
Being community-focused, CSA farms are run under organic or biodynamic principles. A key element of CSA is its shared risk, membership-marketing structure, which helps to financially protect farmers while linking them directly to consumers.
“I was searching for a real-world solution to this problem,” says Yan. “But it changed my life. It wasn’t only a workable business model, it’s a lifestyle.”
Shared Harvest is the result of what Yan learned during her six-month stint at the American farm, which covered everything from farming methods to member management. And the farm is not only her workplace, it’s also the place where she held her wedding. At Shared Harvest, Yan walked down the aisle carrying a bouquet of broccoli instead of flowers and fed her guests dishes made from food grown on-site.
Today the farm supplies fresh produce to its 500 members living in the city.
“A lot of people don’t know where their food comes from. It’s a world far away, but CSA is about relationships. It’s important for consumers to understand and build a relationship with farmers,” says Yan.
When she first started Shared Harvest, few had heard of CSA. Now, there are more than 500 CSA farms in China. This month, Yan helped organise the sixth annual international and seventh national CSA conferences, which took place in Beijing.
Healthy methods
The farm prides itself on natural alternatives to synthetic pesticides. Instead of synthetic fertilisers, farmers use ash, hot pepper, and tobacco water to treat crop diseases, such as leaf spotting.
Farmers can spend half a day picking bugs off plants by hand, and on the rare occasion that crops are infected beyond repair, the team simply rips them out and starts again.
Yan tells me the key is managing the soil quality. “Take humans, for example,” she says. “If you’re healthy when you get a cold, you’re able to recover naturally and faster. With farms, the most important thing is healthy soil. If the soil is carefully maintained, then the diversity and quality of the produce is also good and you can deal with problems better.”
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But finding natural solutions can be tedious and labour-intensive, with some problems requiring weeks of individual attention. Unsurprisingly, Shared Harvest members pay a premium upfront for their weekly delivery. Supplies of vegetables, eggs and meat cost roughly three times more than that sold at ordinary supermarkets. It’s expensive, but Yan believes 40 percent of Beijing residents can afford green produce. “It requires a different mind-set,” she says.
And it’s not only the consumers whom Yan hopes to convince. She’s equally determined to educate Chinese farmers about organic practices. “We have to understand the mind of the farmer, and using pesticides is just like smoking. They’re addicted to it,” she says.
A costly addiction
Pesticides were first introduced in the 1970s, and quickly became a mainstay on Chinese farms thanks to easy access, low regulation and government subsidies. The agricultural industry gorged itself on chemical use in order to increase and maintain food output to sustain a growing population. However, the environment, and ultimately the consumer, paid the price.
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| Located in the suburbs of Beijing, an otherwise quiet outdoor shopping centre is transformed into a makeshift organic market [Katrina Yu/Al Jazeera] |
After the famine experienced during the Cultural Revolution, “China was terrified of being hungry,” explains Wang Jing from Greenpeace East Asia. “But now, the situation has changed, and we are witnessing 11 consecutive years of grain increase. Now, the concern is environmental damage and food safety.”
This year, China was ranked as one of the world’s worst safety violation offenders by the American food consulting firm, Food Sentry, which noted that pesticides were a major problem. Laboratory testing found that 32 distinct pesticides were found in Chinese foods, mostly produce, fruit and spices. A variety of studies have found a link between pesticides and a wide range of health problems, ranging from headaches and nausea to cancer and endocrine disruption. American research released in 2009 showed strong links between agrichemicals and birth defects.
But Greenpeace East Asia says that, while Chinese consumers are conscious of food safety problems, awareness about environmental impact is low. “Pesticides have polluted more than 100 million mu of arable land, that’s more than six million hectares. And those pesticides have entered into the waterways and accumulated in the soil, and are even present in the air,” says Wang.
But, she adds, the long-term implications for food production are equally as alarming. “The northeast region of China is known for being the most fertile, famous for what’s called ‘black soil’. But now, this region is losing one millimetre of black soil every year due to water, wind and meltwater erosion. And it takes 300 to 400 years for this to form naturally.”
According to Greenpeace East Asia, urgent changes are needed to protect both China’s food safety and security.
“It will be a disaster if China doesn’t take responsibility to make a shift. There should be a diversion of public investment into a smarter way that considers sustainability,” says Wang, adding that she would like to see more funding for CSA farming.
Building trust
Home to the world’s largest agricultural system, China produces 20 percent of the world’s food supply, the majority of which is wheat and grains, while owning only10 percent of its cultivated land.
Some trace China’s organic farming origins to the 1990 government “Green Food” certification programme, which marked certain produce not as “organic” but rather, “high-quality and pesticide-controlled food”. It was developments in this programme that later led to the formation of the country’s first organic certification bodies.
According to organic trade fair Biofach, the penetration of organic produce in China remains a drop in the ocean, accounting for just 1.01 percent of total food consumption. But it’s growing fast, with that number nearly triple 2007’s 0.36 percent.
The momentum can be felt at Beijing’s weekly farmers’ market. Taking place in the family-friendly suburbs of the city’s northeast, an otherwise quiet outdoor shopping centre is transformed by the presence of hundreds of shoppers crowding the makeshift stalls of 40 organic suppliers.
I arrive to find market convener, Chang Tianle, on stage surrounded by children. It happens to be the market’s fifth anniversary and a special programme has been organised. “I was asking them fun questions, like who’s the youngest farmer here and who just gave birth to a baby. It’s just to introduce our market and the ideas behind it. To support local producers, protect the environment etc,” she later explains.
Started in 2010, the market began as a small arts project involving only a handful of organic farmers selling to a small crowd of expats and young Chinese.
Chang, a former journalist who joined the team four and half years ago, is credited with spreading the message of the farmers’ market to the wider community. “At the beginning, people didn’t really understand what we were trying to do and who we are. So we did a lot of education and advocacy via social media,” says Chang.
Today the Beijing Farmers’ Market attracts 1,000 customers each weekend and is supplemented by a permanent “Community Market” shop close by. Customers seem to fall largely into two groups: elderly Chinese and families with young children.
“The elderly come out of curiosity and keep coming because they say the food tastes more like the food they used to eat when they were young,” says Chang. “But a typical farmers’ market shopper is a young parent in their 30s who wants to know that the food they’re feeding their family is safe.”
At the market, Chang says, customers talk to farmers, and some even visit the farms. “It builds trust,” she adds.