A farmer in China embraces tradition to weather climate calamities

Kangli Li is waiting for the rain to stop. It should have stopped a month ago. She needs to rebuild the mud floor of her farm’s water cellar, damaged by consecutive droughts the years before. Without the mud, the cellar can’t store water. Without the cellar, Li can’t water her fruit tree farm in Yunnan province, in southwestern China.

Li had a new well dug recently and it didn’t hit water until 140 meters (460 feet), so she extended it an additional 70 meters (229.6 feet) to prepare for future droughts.

Climate change-induced extreme weather events are increasingly disrupting local farming. For the past nine years, Li and her husband have been farming long enough to notice that the weather is getting increasingly unpredictable. “The problem is it’s out of order. We used to know, for example, when it’s a certain jieqi… we have a rough pattern,” she says. “Now we don’t.”

Jieqi is a series of 24 Chinese terms that signify 24 specific natural phenomena that occur over the four seasons. They represent the wisdom of ancient Chinese to describe the patterns of nature.

Traditionally, farmers have relied on jieqi to determine the timing of farming activities year-round. But with accelerating climate change, such wisdom is no longer providing any certainty to Li. “You never know what it is going to be,” she says.

Li takes comfort in one thing, though: the chestnut, walnut, bayberry and pomegranate trees on her 17-acre farm seem to be doing better than those on nearby farms in her small mountain village of Nuoda in northern Yunnan. Kangli thinks the difference is that unlike her neighbors, she uses a traditional way to restore an ecosystem on her orchards instead of using herbicides and chemical fertilizers.

Li is one of a small but growing number of farmers in China who are returning to traditional growing practices for better and safer food and to reconnect with nature.

Different from organic farming, which emphasizes not applying chemicals, they are finding their own way of ecological farming centered around building the miniature ecosystem with traditional techniques more resilient to climate change.

As they face increasing droughts, floods and other weather-related disasters, they are spurning chemical sprays, using natural fertilizers and adopting other techniques aimed at restoring depleted soils.

“They still only consist of a very small percentage but we see a trend in China that is building up,” says Hao Wang, one of the co-founders of FoodThink, a NGO in Beijing that researches and promotes sustainable food and agriculture. He conducts field trips to ecological farms all over China. “We’ve observed a certain level of resilience of organic farming.”

In Yunnan province, farmers in recent years have been caught in a vicious cycle of extreme weather, including droughts, heat waves and floods. The most critical problem has been extended dry periods.

“Drought from the perspective of climate change is the issue that affects central Yunnan the most, especially to the agriculture side,” says Miao Qi, a PhD candidate at Cornell University who has been conducting her field trips in Yunnan for almost a decade and studies climate change and agriculture.

Li remembers the fall of 2022, when the rains came months late. By then, the soil on her fruit farm was so dry that she and her husband couldn’t plow it. The following year brought more drought. By last spring, almost all the water reservoirs in her village were dried up. Then, when the rains finally came, they lasted so long that fields and basements flooded for months, disrupting the farming cycle again.

She’s been dealing with strange weather ever since she and her husband and two children returned to her hometown of Nuoda in 2014 to take up farming. In addition to the torrential rains and fierce droughts, there have been hailstorms and even snow, traditionally rare in the area.

A study analyzing the extreme weather events in Yunnan province showed extreme temperatures have been increasing together with a gradual drying trend in the past 60 years. Extreme precipitation has become more intense.

Li is convinced her embrace of traditional farming techniques has made a difference. For example, many farmers in her village long ago switched to spraying herbicides to kill weeds, which would otherwise grow too thickly for anyone to be able to collect nuts and fruit falling from the trees. But she hires workers to cut the weeds by hand, instead of spraying.

Long before they fully took over the farm in 2021, Li and her husband asked the former owner not to use synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fertilizers. As a result, she says, her soil is richer and the tree roots are healthier. “The fibrous roots of the walnut tree, with years of herbicide use are usually dead.”

After 15 years without herbicides, Li’s walnut trees are more resilient to the disruptions of the climate, she says. The nuts are smaller in drought years, but her overall yield is stable and higher than her neighbors. She’s noticed that heavy rains tend to knock down trees that have been weakened by heavy pesticide use — but not her trees.

Experts say Kangli has a point. “If a certain group of plants exist in one area, there must be a plant community. All different species coexist with its surrounding ecosystem, such as microorganisms.” says Guanqi Li, the chief coordinator of the Farmers’ Seed Network (China), a research and advocacy group. Plant communities are more likely to survive in a changing environment than monocultures.

“I feel that I’m restoring an ecosystem, to make it sustainable and back to order,” Li says. Her main method is just let it be. If the trees can’t heal themselves, she will let them die. She welcomes wild animals and plants to live on her farm with her fruit trees and wild weeds. She even encountered several large snakes a few times in the summer. “They were enjoying the sun, I guess,” Li says.

Recently, she discovered mushrooms living on top of a termite nest. But instead of using insecticide, Li let the termites stay. “They feed off the branches we trimmed off our trees.”

In contrast, she has noticed that her neighbors do everything possible to try to keep their trees alive. They use different and highly efficient chemical products to repel pests and try to maintain a high yield at every step of the tree’s growth. But she has also noticed that as droughts and floods increase, the trees on the chemical-dependent farms seem more prone to pests and require more spraying and more water, forcing their owners to dig more wells and buy more chemicals.

“They will definitely either increase the dose or find other products,” Kangli says. “I think it’s because their land has turned bad.”

Climate change exacerbates the side effects of “modern farming,” as Kangli has noticed in her village. This echoes what Qi has observed on her field trips to the farms in Yunnan. Farms are getting more concentrated and larger. They usually just have one species and apply heavy man-made interference.

Those farms tend to face more frequent outbreaks of plant diseases and pests under the climate change situation and the owners resort to heavier interventions such as finding new chemicals or increasing the doses.

“Our modern way of farming and the food system based on it are actually more fragile than we’ve thought.” Qi says. However small it is for now in China, ecological farming is providing a potential alternative. “But it will take some time.”