Is agriculture really only suitable for people with passion?

The “No. 1 document” has been issued again, and people across the country have once again begun hotly debating agriculture.

Such a scene plays out once every year at this time. If I remember correctly, usually not long after the “two sessions,” the heated discussion about agriculture gradually cools down, and then disappears. To describe this phenomenon with an idiom, it is a case of a tiger's head and a snake's tail.

As you can tell, I am not here to sing praises.

Accompanying the great agricultural drama staged every spring——the “No. 1 document”——there is another phenomenon: articles in all the major media such as “the opportunity for agriculture has come,” “the next investment hotspot is agriculture,” “agriculture is ushering in a golden age,” and so on. You will find: there were such articles two years ago, there are such articles two years later, and there were such articles two years before that, and still such articles four years before that…… These articles are well-founded and can be called keenly observant and insightful about policy. But after reading too many of them, one cannot help but suddenly feel doubtful: has the opportunity for agriculture actually come or not?

When will it come?

Agriculture has no such thing as opportunity

Ten years ago, when I first began researching rural policy, the country had just started to propose building a new countryside. For a while, I felt quite pumped up, like I had been injected with chicken blood, and was very keen on preaching that “the opportunity for agriculture has come.” When people learned that I worked on rural affairs, they would often ask me whether there were now great development opportunities in the countryside. My answer not only told them yes, but also vividly described all the opportunities in agriculture. As for things like “ten consecutive years of No. 1 documents,” I would also pour that into others whenever I brought it up. Quite a few people were dazzled by my talk and went into agriculture. In the days that followed, on the one hand I continued this kind of spiel, and on the other hand I began answering the problems encountered by those who had been talked into agriculture years earlier in their agricultural production and business activities. Of course, answering these questions was also very simple: agriculture is an industry with a long cycle and slow results, and it is impossible to achieve success overnight; do not engage in agriculture with a mentality of rushing for quick success. Undoubtedly, this answer was a standard answer acceptable to both sides, and no one ever questioned it.

But later I slowly discovered that the problems encountered by people who entered agriculture for all kinds of reasons hoping to develop were not only because of agriculture's own long cycle and slow results, nor only because they did not grasp national agricultural policy well enough. Some people plunged into a certain agricultural project, invested tens of millions, and spent more than ten years, yet still returned disappointed. Does that mean more than ten years is not long enough? Thinking carefully about the answer “long cycle and slow results,” it is actually an extremely irresponsible piece of nonsense——apart from stock trading and a few other possibilities of getting rich overnight, which industries achieve success overnight? Thinking carefully about why agriculture looks beautiful but is hard to do, one discovers: “beautiful” is only in comparison with thirty or forty years ago, a macro-level imagining or inference, with quite a bit of the flavor of the “Chinese Dream”; “hard” is that after plunging in, one finds it is very bony, very cruel. To put it plainly, the core reason agriculture struggles is that the central government's policy toward agriculture is always thunder loud but rain small.

Just think: in recent years the central government has issued many policies to support and benefit agriculture, but how much has truly been implemented at the grassroots level?

It has already been two or three years since agriculture ceased to be my “primary industry,” so I no longer have the former focus and entanglement. But my roots are in the countryside, and sometimes I still “accidentally” see articles on the internet or WeChat saying “the opportunity for agriculture has come.” By rights, I should turn a deaf ear to such “the wolf is coming” articles. But two or three years have passed, and Chinese people have placed far too many expectations on agriculture, so I cannot help clicking in to take a look. Although the articles are newly packaged, the viewpoints are basically the same old tune——apart from policy, still policy!

By common sense, the proposition “has the opportunity for agriculture come or not” seems unproblematic. Because for any industry or any project, there is always a best time to enter: this is true of the automobile manufacturing industry, true of the IT industry, and likewise true of the cultural industry. Strangely, for agriculture, the slogan “the opportunity has come” has actually been shouted for more than ten years! By common sense, people with different industry backgrounds have different visions and angles when looking at problems, and the conclusions they reach should be different; only that would be normal. Articles like “the opportunity for agriculture has come” are basically all written by people outside agricultural circles. Because for people inside agricultural circles, there is no question of discussing opportunity; whether or not there is opportunity, what must be done still has to be done. But strangely, when people from different backgrounds talk about agriculture, their eyes all turn in unison toward policy, and the answers seem highly unified, yet the results are always poles apart! Why? What is even more puzzling is that “the opportunity for agriculture has come” has been shouted for more than ten years, and it seems no one has seriously interpreted it: is it that agriculture has consistently had one opportunity all along for more than ten years? Or that agriculture's opportunities have been continuously coming for more than ten years? Or that agriculture's opportunity is about to come after more than ten years?

Honestly, I understand it less and less.

Until last month, after going back to my hometown to organize a group purchase of Ningxia tan sheep, I finally found the answer to whether “the opportunity for agriculture” has come. This thought originated from——when I carried the resentment brought from the agriculture bureau and complained to the county magistrate about the government's inaction on agriculture, a thought suddenly flashed in my mind: Am I right? Haven't my brothers and sisters, and my father's generation and grandfather's generation, always been doing agriculture without government support? Why do I complain when there is no government support? Is my reason for doing agriculture merely to obtain government support?

On the bus from the county seat to Yinchuan, and on the plane from Yinchuan to Beijing, this question kept lingering in my mind. I finally understood: agriculture has no such thing as opportunity or no opportunity; it is only a question of whether it suits you. Agriculture belongs only to people with passion.

Opportunism is the greatest harm to agriculture

Agriculture is different from computers, different from automobiles, different from film, television, and antique collecting. In addition to its attribute as a commodity, it also bears the fundamental maintenance of life. People can go without wearing a watch, can go without using a computer, and can even go without clothes, but they cannot go without eating! Precisely because agriculture accompanies the bearing and carrying of life, choosing to engage in agriculture means one must tacitly accept this responsibility, with no way to shirk it. However, in China today, when people discuss the development opportunities of agriculture, they discuss only its economic attribute and commodity attribute, while stripping away the special mission agriculture carries. Although there are also many “opportunities” envisioned for organic agriculture from the perspective of food safety, what is called the arrival of opportunity, put more plainly, is the arrival of the opportunity to make money. And once agriculture takes making money as its fundamental purpose, that is the root cause of the chaos in Chinese agriculture.

Now, to set things right at the source, looking back, it is not hard to understand the confusing phenomenon of “the opportunity for agriculture has come” every year. Because some people engage in the agricultural industry, while some are merely speculating to make money; some produce food, while some treat food only as a commodity. Although all are “agriculture,” the discussion contexts differ, understandings of “opportunity” differ, and therefore the outcomes differ. But returning to the true nature of agriculture, since people must eat every day, agriculture's opportunity has always existed. It will never become outdated like a 386 computer or a BP pager, nor will opportunity come only because of a “No. 1 document” or the introduction of some policy. “Whether you see me or not, I am there, neither sad nor happy; whether you love me or not, love is there, neither increasing nor decreasing.” Without passion, after failing to seize opportunity you will be disappointed, you will get angry, you will complain. Without passion, having seized opportunity, for agriculture it is not construction, but destruction or even disaster: first, it hollows out policy and plunders the welfare that should have belonged to farmers, resulting in pure opportunism; second, it destroys agriculture's own ecological balance, plunging agriculture itself into a vicious cycle of shortsighted utilitarianism; third, it leads to food and food safety problems, making everyone feel insecure.

First, policy. Think carefully: so-called articles like “the opportunity for agriculture has come” refer to nothing more than the development opportunities brought by the central government's policies toward agriculture. If we say that when the opportunity for real estate comes, or when the opportunity for new energy comes, it mostly refers to policy convenience and tax reductions. Then compared with that, agricultural policy support is real gold and silver paid directly into accounts. Precisely because it is real gold and silver, it has become the Tang monk's flesh for a group of opportunists; everyone wants to take a bite. As early as 2005, I participated in several research projects on rural cooperative economics. Theoretically, Chinese agriculture really does need such organizations, so I thought “the opportunity has come,” and took the lead in setting up a cooperative in my hometown, beginning my career in agricultural entrepreneurship. But after the Law of the People's Republic of China on Farmers' Professional Cooperatives was promulgated in 2007, especially when the media talked endlessly about the “enterprise + cooperative organization + farmer” model, and when governments at all levels were vigorously “cultivating” their own “leading enterprises,” I began to have an ominous premonition that in this policy-driven “industrial chain,” farmers would inevitably be reduced to a stepping stone for others and would not receive the slightest benefit! In fact, I once made a rough count: during 2008 and 2009 alone, documents for various agriculture-supporting and agriculture-benefiting funding projects from central ministries and commissions that I could obtain numbered more than 20, but how much of this money actually subsidized farmers needs no answer. A classmate working in a central government agriculture-related institution once criticized my approach of establishing my own cooperative and personally farming the land. He did not understand why I always chose to make money by farming. Their mode of operation is: in the second half of each year, near year-end, when various departments begin successively formulating, issuing, and applying for the next year's agriculture-supporting projects, they also gather various “leading enterprises” one after another for “closed-door meetings” at resorts. According to policy requirements, they “tailor-make” application plans. Then they act according to the rules and “catch all in one net” the next year's funds! When I was conducting research in one place, the mayor, in order to prove that his implementation of central agriculture-related policies was thorough and that local government support was strong, pointed to a municipal-level “leading enterprise” boss present and said that enterprises like theirs only needed to turn on their machines once a year to obtain tens of millions in project funds. This remark hit the nail on the head——there are so many enterprises that can easily obtain policy funds by “turning on their machines once a year”! What was originally agriculture-benefiting funding was grasped in the hands of those who had spotted “the opportunity for agriculture has come.” And those who did not seize it could only receive the reply that “agriculture is an industry with a long cycle and slow results,” and begin to complain; or from then on embark on a stumbling path of cultivation. And in this lively and flourishing heated discussion of “the opportunity for agriculture has come,” where are the farmers?

——They know nothing at all, and are still working as migrant workers in the cities!

Unlike opportunists whose “profit model” is obtaining national policy funds, capital opportunists entering agriculture are mainly market-oriented. What people holding capital see in agriculture is fundamentally aimed at maximizing economic benefits, unrelated to humanity or ecology. They must speak of “modern,” must speak of “scientific,” must speak of “scale,” and take “go all out and work fast” as their guiding principle. To sum up, this mainstream path of Chinese agricultural industrialization is: a bunch of people who study investment and business models tell you how agriculture should be done; a bunch of people with money and power who are willful but do not understand agriculture go to rural areas to enclose land; the government, induced and pressured by interests, begins driving farmers upstairs in the name of industrialization or new countryside renovation; some experts who have never set foot in a field and can only parrot others begin instructing farmers on how to “farm scientifically”…… From then on, amid the clarion call of the “No. 1 document,” the drain-the-pond-to-catch-the-fish plunder of rural areas, agriculture, and farmers proceeds in full swing: pear trees that had already formed groves were all cut down and replaced with grapes to plan and build China's largest “Bordeaux” winery; a small but refined food-processing factory tucked away in a corner with traditional craftsmanship, overnight put out the slogan of striving to be world number one; the New Year pigs that every household used to raise, under the “enterprise + farmer” model, even when a sow gives birth to piglets must be made into “standardized production”…… And so, under the dominance of this concept, chickens that previously lived seven or eight years, could fly up trees, and loved eating insects, in modern workshops fully armed with temperature, humidity, lighting, and sound insulation, can only raise their heads to drink water and lower their heads to eat feed. In their pitiful lives of about 30 days, there is no sunlight, no fresh flowers, no drizzling rain…… Any tiny sound from the outside world is enough to instantly kill these lives; their lives have become so fragile that they must rely on large amounts of antibiotics and hormones to be maintained. Because of the pursuit of maximum profit, chemical fertilizers and ripening agents can be used without any bottom line, wishing that crops would grow the very day after planting; to make chickens lay more eggs, they can be exposed to strong light twenty-four hours a day; because it was discovered that as long as pigs do not move there is no energy consumption and they grow more meat, pigs are fed knockout drugs so they eat and sleep, sleep and eat; after the predatory mode of production causes ecological imbalance, in order to resist pests and diseases, any highly toxic pesticide is used…… Agriculture's own ecological balance has been completely broken, and whether it is planted grain and vegetables or raised cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens, they have all lost the nature of life……“The sedge in the lake has withered, and there are no longer birds singing here.”

The greatest harm of this profit-driven mode of agricultural production is that it completely deletes agriculture's basic attribute as food first, reducing food merely to a commodity exchangeable for money. Because of the emphasis on science and efficiency, a chicken that originally laid one egg a day became a chicken that lays two eggs a day; a lamb that originally gained more than twenty jin of meat only after three months was forcibly fattened to gain more than one hundred jin of meat in three months; tomatoes that originally took four months to ripen fully, in order to bring them to market sooner for money, can turn red overnight; red and sweet is the essence of watermelon, but now it is only red and not sweet; fat and lean is the characteristic of pork, but now pork is only lean and not fat; driven by profit, garlic can rise from two yuan to ten yuan overnight; mung beans can at any time “bean you for a fool,” ginger can every day “ginger you to death”; the day before yesterday they were still swearing to plan and build the “largest wine cellar,” yesterday farmers' grapes rotted in heaps; people across the country flood abroad to buy milk, while domestic milk can only be poured into ditches…… In such an industrial chain that cares only about seizing opportunity and has no passion, farmers' interests cannot be safeguarded, the ecological environment has been destroyed, industrial laws are unprecedentedly chaotic, food security is precarious, and food safety makes everyone feel insecure.

Chinese agriculture has entered an age of declining dharma

In the public lecture series “Great Lecture Hall on Traditional Chinese Health Culture” that I was responsible for hosting, I was asked more than once why our curriculum included “agriculture.” The questioners often asked me with blank faces what “agriculture” could talk about. Every time I encountered this question, I would often ask in return: In China's culture of several thousand years, which culture is older than “agriculture”? Among all the elements of health preservation, which element is more important than eating? Each time, the conversation with the questioner always ended with his “oh,” but at the same time I would be brought to an inexplicable sadness. Since when have Chinese people excluded “agriculture” from “national studies”? Since when has national studies been stripped down until only Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, and the Four Books and Five Classics remain? What this question reflects is precisely this: as a country with several thousand years of agricultural civilization, “agriculture” is no longer regarded as a culture worthy of elegant halls; people eat grain every day, but Chinese people have long forgotten that there is still an industry so closely tied to their own lives! For a nation that created the most brilliant agricultural civilization in human history, this must be called a sorrow.