A pioneer in China's organic farming
“Xin Nongren” means “New Farmers”, which is applied to young Chinese who have quit jobs in cities to devote themselves to sustainable farming. Shi Yan, the founder of Shared Harvest, an organic farm in the countryside north of Beijing, is a representative of “Xin Nongren”.
Shi Yan was born in 1982 in Hebei Province. As a young student at the Renmin University of China, she was
concerned about the widespread environmental damage being caused by chemical-reliant farming practices. In 2008, she travelled to the US as an intern at Minnesota's Earthrise Farm to see the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in action.
Being community-focused, CSA farms are run under organic principles. A key element of CSA is its shared risk, membership-marketing structure, which helps to financially protect farmers while connecting them to consumers.
Shared Harvest is the result of what Yan learned at the American farm. Opened in 2012, it is not only a completely organic farm but it is also one of the first in China to follow the CSA model. When she first started Shared Harvest, few had heard of CSA. Now, there are more than 1,500 CSA farms in China.
Shared Harvest prides itself on natural alternatives to chemical pesticides. Instead of chemicals, the team uses hot pepper water, for instance, to treat crop diseases. Farmers can spend half a day picking bugs off plants by hand, and on the rare occasion that crops are infected beyond repair, they simply root them out and start again.
Finding natural solutions can be time-consuming and labourintensive, with some problems requiring weeks of individual attention. Unsurprisingly, supplies of vegetables, eggs and meat cost about three times more than that sold at ordinary grocery stores. It's expensive, but Yan believes 40 per cent of Beijing residents can afford green produce. “It requires a different mindset,” she says.
And Yan not only hopes to convince the consumers, but she's 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.
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