Can organic farming only ever be a personal lifestyle?

In 2000, An Jinlei, a farmer in Dongzilong Village, Matun Town, Zaoqiang County, Hebei Province, contracted 40 mu of land in the village and began practicing his organic farming of "no pesticides, no chemical fertilizers, no herbicides," trying to pick up traditional farming methods. An Jinlei used fertilizer bags to collect poultry and livestock manure from all around, applied poultry and livestock manure to all of the more than 40 mu of land, and adopted intercropping of cotton, soybeans and sesame. More than a decade passed, and not a single severe pest outbreak occurred on his farmland. In early 2013, An Jinlei was also named one of the "2012 People Who Moved Hebei of the Year," becoming a star of the "organic farming experiment."

In 2005, in Liufang Village, Liping County, Guizhou Province, a similar "organic farming experiment" was quietly beginning. Farmer Wu Shixian took the lead in guiding villagers to revive traditional Dong farming methods. They used 30 mu of paddy field as an experiment - no longer planting hybrid rice, instead switching to saved seed or traditional rice varieties preserved by the local agricultural science institute, no longer using pesticides or chemical fertilizers, and partly restoring the Dong tradition of "rice-fish-duck" farming. The following year, 700 mu of paddy field belonging to all 164 households in the village began to spread organic farming. Because the agricultural products were green and environmentally friendly, they once attracted purchasing groups from major cities such as Hong Kong, China, Chengdu and Guiyang.

However, the ecological pursuit of organic farming and efficient income growth seem to be a pair of contradictions. Amid the praise, the organic farming experiment in Liufang Village produced very little economic benefit, and coupled with the outflow of rural labor, fewer and fewer people in the village persisted with organic farming. An Jinlei's experiment, by contrast, was seen more as a personal lifestyle and was described as that of a "philosopher in the fields."

More importantly, this approach of trying to build a food safety firewall with traditional farming methods seems that it can only be an individual case, hard to promote in China, where there are many people and little land. "With a limited area of cultivated land, if modern science and technology are completely rejected and organic farming production methods are followed, it is impossible to feed China's 1.36 billion people." On July 11, Ye Xingqing, director of the Rural Economy Research Department of the Development Research Center of the State Council, said at the "Ecological Agriculture and Food Safety" forum.