BEIJING: While most residents stayed warm in their heated apartments as Beijing braced for its heaviest snowfall in mid-December, Dai Wanli and her husband took their 8-year-old son to a shared vegetable garden in the Changping district.
About an hour drive from their house in the capital, the family tends to a 1,000-square-meter greenhouse and surrounding plots in the northern suburb, practicing hobby farming on weekends.
Dai, a human resources manager, and her husband, who works in media, knelt in the soil, harvesting celery, radishes and broccoli. Their son followed, carrying a small basket and inspecting seedlings. “During the week, we sit in offices, dealing with complex and intangible problems,” Dai said. “Despite the physically tiring work, we feel relaxed and peaceful in the green and quiet countryside.”
Dai’s family is part of China’s growing trend of “weekend farmers”. Driven by the pursuit of better-quality food, a desire to escape work pressures, and nostalgia for rural life, urban residents are flocking to shared farms on the city’s outskirts for a temporary retreat.
With a high demand for healthier foods, the couple decided to invest in a shared farm a few years ago. They started with two strips of land at a commercial farm in Daxing, south of Beijing, with an annual rent of about 16,000 yuan ($2,300).
The farm operates under a trusteeship model, where locals do the farming and tenants visit to pick produce.
However, this did not satisfy Dai’s husband, who grew up in rural Shandong province and had farming experience.
“We suspected they were still using chemical fertilizers to ensure the vegetables looked good for the customers. We were even unsure if the vegetables we picked were actually from ‘our’ plot,” she said.
They moved to their current garden in Changping, sharing a larger area with three other families for 12,000 yuan per year. There are no staff to do the farm work, so the tenants do it themselves, with management providing water and electricity.
“We enjoy a deeper level of engagement than solely being consumers,” Dai said, noting that the families appointed a leader to manage the agricultural calendar, bulk-buy seeds, and coordinate repairs. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
