Introduction

The unprecedented rural labour migration in China has resulted in the transformation of rural areas and the entire rural society. Migrant workers returning to their hometowns are a new force that is promoting social transformation and changing the urban-rural relationship in the context of integrated development. Since the early 2000s, the modernization of agriculture and the integration of urban and rural areas has meant significant advancements in China’s modernization. The government has introduced policies to enforce agricultural supply structural reforms and support rural areas and the agricultural sector. Therefore, returning farmers, especially those who are young, have become the “generation of the entrepreneurs” in the countryside. Having facilitated urban-rural integration, these young farmers are innovating agricultural production and management and utilizing diverse practices to realize agriculture’s integration with secondary and tertiary industries as the government has been advocating. Rural youth have been growing up as the backbone of rural revitalization and agricultural development. Thus, it is of far-reaching practical significance to identify young farmers’ difficulties in market integration and organizing their production and explore young farmers’ adaptations as they enter or return to farming.

This chapter is based on a survey and field research in the summer of 2017 in Lin town, which is located in Sichuan province in Southwest China. The town is located in the Zengjia Mountain as the map illustrates. The town’s agricultural specialization is cabbage, but the low profit earned from farming resulted in many young people migrating for employment. Young farmers are unusual in the village and much of the research team’s time in the town was spent identifying interviewees. With the help of town officials and village committee cadres, the research team was able to interview 28 young farmersFootnote 1 under the age of 45 in five villages of Lin town. Residences are scattered across this mountainous area, and coupled with the rareness of young farmers, the research team had to rely on introductions from village leaders in locating interviewees. It engendered a potential risk of a biased sample in that young farmers who lived in remote areas or did not have a close relationship with village leaders may not have been contacted. Despite this reality of fieldwork, the interviewees’ stories reflect the common situation and challenges of young farmers in the area (Map 6.1).

Map 6.1
A map of China with its provinces highlights Lin Town.

Study area. (Source: Ministry of Natural Resources Map Technical Review Center)

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Among the 28 interviewees, the youngest was 19 years old while the oldest was 45 years old. Most of the farmers were over 30 years old. The overall education level of the research subjects was not high: 19 of the interviewees finished primary school (6 years of schooling), 6 finished junior high school (9 years), only 1 finished senior high school (12 years), and 2 didn’t finish primary school. In terms of gender ratio, 15 interviewees were male and 13 were female. Twenty-four were former labour migrants, many of whom had returned home in the past two years. Their occupational experiences were quite varied: 21 interviewees worked in market-based vegetable cultivation; one served as a village director while tending his farmland in his spare time; two grew Chinese herbs that were used for traditional medicines; six of the returners were engaged in farm tourism; and one farmer was dedicated to livestock rearing—he had 60 horses and more than 30 sheep (Table 6.1).

Table 6.1 Basic information of interviewees
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This chapter divides young farmers into two categories: passive settlers and the young returnees, defined by their migration experience. Living in the countryside, these young farmers have different logics and actions when they confront common market risks and systematization difficulties. Each adapts to the changing social environment and the relationship between urban and rural areas, acquiring resources and drawing on knowledge earned during their migration experiences. They draw on their close relations and social networks as they embark on a road of embedded innovation and entrepreneurship in the agricultural industry. Young farmers’ adaptations have increased their incomes while helping them to cope with the issues of family separation and labour shortages in the sector. Their involvement in agriculture and rural development has made important impacts on rural-urban integration.

Community Profile

Lin is located in a mountainous area of ​​northern Sichuan, lying at an altitude of over 1000 metres. The town is 50 kilometres from the county seat and over 300 kilometres from the provincial capital of Chengdu. Lin is a typical mountainous agricultural town. Farmers make their living through the crop cultivation. Due to the cold climate and scattered farmland allocations in mountains that limit crop size, yield of grain plantation was low. Local farmers gradually found vegetables to be most suitable for cultivation, especially cabbage and hot peppers. In Lin town, there are also farmers who grow herbs and other plants used in Chinese herbal medicine, including Gastrodia Elata, horseradish, and schisandra, among others. These operations, though, are on a very small scale. Vegetable cultivation began in the town in the early 1990s at the dawn of China’s market economic reform. Farmers started small, growing vegetables on land that otherwise offered low grain yields. The quality of local vegetables is very good due to the bigger temperature difference in mountainous areas. In the 1990s, there was also considerable market demand for vegetables in the plains area of the county, and local farmers formulated a “grain-vegetable” plantation system as a stable livelihood activity. By the end of 2008, Lin town had developed a specialization in vegetable cultivation with the promotional support of its local government. Three decades after the first vegetable crops, farmers in the town are still focused on vegetable cultivation. The planting area has expanded significantly, and it has become the backbone of the town’s agricultural economy. The mountainous terrain, however, means that the per capita land area is so small that farming alone cannot support rural families. The dawn of market reform was also, for Lin town, the dawn of rural labour migration. Like villages and towns across rural China, a large number of rural labourers have left home over the years to work as wage labourers in urban areas. There are few labourers younger than age 45 who remain in the village. The left-behind elderly have no choice but to devote themselves to vegetable cultivation as younger and more able family members are working in the city.

With the sluggish labour market in recent years, especially after the global fiscal crisis in 2008, some migrants began to return home. At present, officials and farmers in Lin town are responding to the government’s appeal for agricultural supply-side structural reform and are continuing to invest in the town’s vegetable industry. In 2012, the local government proposed a new strategy of industrial integration—agrotourism. Local policies have a considerable impact on young migrants returning home. Some return to work the land and engage in market-oriented vegetable production, which comes with its own problems related to marketing and organizing production. At the same time, other young returnees have dedicated their time, energy, and experience to various agriculture-related industries, such as e-commerce and agro-products processing, and taken steps to alter the traditional peasant agriculture.

Young Farmers’ Pathways into Farming: Why Would They Stay or Return?

In Lin town, but also across China’s vast western countryside, the rural labour migration trend began in the 1990s. The social mobility of the rural population, which was discussed in Chap. 5, must be taken into account as we try to better understand the relationship between agriculture, farmers, and rural development in the town. We identified two key characteristics of young farmers in Lin town: their social mobility between the rural and the urban, keeping in mind that most of the young farmers are former labour migrants, and that this group is highly diversified and differentiated in their rural and farming activities. These two characteristics are related to the local natural environment, to commodified vegetable production, and to the local government’s current rural development policies. It is necessary to distinguish between farmers with experience as migrant workers and farmers who have remained in the village in order to understand better contemporary young farmers and the differences in their rural lives and farming work. Although these two groups are living together in the villages, the mindset of returnees and those who have never migrated is not identical.

Reasons for Staying

In rural area, it is common that those who engage in agriculture, especially in traditional grain cultivation, live a hard life, due in part to scarce and fragmented farmland. As rural life has been gradually commodified and monetized in the market economy, farmers face increasing pressure to meet their basic needs and earning money thus becomes the primary goal for them. In Lin town, there are very few farmers under the age of 45 engaging in agricultural production. The town’s cadres told researchers that they believe the fundamental reason for this lack of interest is that “agriculture is not attractive.” They offered two key reasons: First, it is difficult for young people to gain a sense of self-realization from working on land as farmers, and second, it is difficult to live a well-off life with earnings from agriculture. Those who remain in the village often have no other option. They may not have enough physical strength to seek employment in the city or they may have to take care of the elders, children, or sick family members. Patriarchy and gender norms in some local areas prevent young women from leaving home. These young people who have never experienced migration are referred to as passive stayers or “left-behind” labourers.

Wang Yong from YL Village is 42 years old and has never migrated for work. In his production team,Footnote 2 all of the young people under the age of 45 are former migrants. In the late 1990s when migration was in fashion in his village, he had to remain in the village to care for his parents. After their passing, he remained in the village to care for his own children. In taking care of these commitments, Wang missed the best time to migrate. As vegetable cultivation has steadily developed, there was also less incentive for Wang to leave. He could make a living by planting his 4 muFootnote 3 with vegetables and through his part-time job in a local park. In 2017 when we interviewed him, the vegetable market was sluggish. Wang wanted to work in the city, but it was difficult for him to get a job because he was no longer young and did not have any special skill.

In the countryside, strength is the main, if not the only, advantage that rural men have in labour market. The period between age 20 and age 45 is the “golden age” for migrant workers. If they miss their chance to migrate for work when they are young, like in Wang’s case, it becomes very difficult for them to find a job in urban area or they are limited to jobs with low pay and harsh working conditions. Remaining in rural areas like Lin town may have been an active choice for young people in the late 1990s or early 2000s when the price of vegetables was relatively stable and migrant workers’ wages were relatively low. During this period, there was no great difference between income from agriculture and from wage work in the cities. Since 2013, along with the government’s promotion of the vegetable industry and the increasing fluctuations in vegetable prices, more and more farmers are forced to seek alternative sources of income. Their age, however, becomes a major obstacle for their migration since they are no longer “young” in terms of migrant labour.

For young women farmers, their options can be even more limited. In many cases, they are compelled to stay in countryside, weighed down by the gender labour division in family reproduction, family rationalism that seeks maximum material benefits, and cultural disciplines of villages and rural families (Liang and Wu 2017). This is especially true in western rural areas where society is relatively more conservative and traditional compared to the eastern part of China.

Guo Li from YL Village is 40 years old. Her family and her village have strong views about a woman’s role in society. As a result, Guo was not afforded the opportunity to study, and since she finished primary school, she has been working on the farm. When she was younger, women were not encouraged to leave the village for work. Rather, a young women’s duty was to care for her parents and help them with vegetable cultivation. Guo is married with two sons, aged 19 and 12. After her marriage, any opportunity for migration was further thwarted as she needed to remain in the village to care for her children.

Gradually, the taboo that prevented young women from leaving home to find employment was broken and the number of young female migrants from Lin town grew. Here, as in villages and towns across China, the burden of care for children and the elderly remains a huge barrier for would-be young women migrants.

Reasons for Returning

Amidst urban-rural integrated modernization and with the benefits of supportive policies for public entrepreneurship and innovation, returning to the countryside for business has becomes a new phenomenon among rural youth, especially for migrants. Xia’s (2017) research on returning youth entrepreneurs suggests that migrant workers’ returning to their hometowns accelerates urban-rural integration as both physical resources and human resources have been syphoned from the countryside into urban areas for decades which led to enlarging gap between rural and urban. Liu et al.’s (2015) study indicates that young farmer elites are important forces in new forms of agricultural production and operation and play a central role in promoting agricultural production and leading innovation in the countryside. In contrast, some case studies also reveal that the return of young migrants is not an example of counter-urbanization, but rather a manifestation of the failure of urbanization or integration into urban life for rural migrants (Liu and Li 2017).

In Lin town, reasons for farmers to return to their home village and those of passive residents who stay in the village are similar in many ways. As explained earlier, child and elder care are the most common reasons that would-be migrants remain in the countryside. For returnees, though, there is a strong push-pull effect. These young people have been pushed out of the cities due to harsh labour work and stressful workplace expectations. At the same time, they find themselves being pulled back to their rural homes by the entrepreneurial climate in the countryside. Among the 24 interviewees who had experience of migration, 10 returned to care for family members, four because of the difficulties of migrant life in the city, and six were attracted to return by rural development opportunities and entrepreneurship policies. We will focus on the latter two groups as their situations better reflect the realities of this young generation.

Meaningless Working Life and Lack of Dignity

Young farmers who take up a variety of occupations in cities have little freedom to manage their own labour and sometimes even their own bodies. Unlike their parents’ generation of migrants who endured difficult working conditions to earn the wages to sustain their families at home in the village, young migrants today are more aware of their social class position and more conscious of their autonomy beyond wage income. It is a sense of meaningless and deprivation as a commodified labourer while working in cities that outweighs economic benefits of staying.

Zhao Jun is 26 and lives in MZ Village. He found employment in a factory in Hubei province, a province over 1000 kilometres away from his hometown after he finished junior high school. He told us:

I was not accustomed to the urban life. The fast pace of urban life gave me tremendous pressure. Although the salary in the city was high, working like a robot made me extremely depressed. After travelling to many different places as a migrant, I was increasingly bored with the work in the city and convinced that planting vegetables at home would also make money if the market was prosperous. I felt that farming freely and earning some income in my own hometown could also provide a sense of accomplishment for us young people.

In the spring of 2017, he returned to his hometown. He started cultivating vegetables on his 12-mu contracted land and made a trial of agroecology.

Wang Shaoyong from YL Village is the only interviewee with a high school education. After graduation, he worked in Chengdu, Beijing, and in other big cities, including Nanjing. It was during his time here that he had an experience that made him feel quite insecure about working stability and reflect on the meaning of work.

One day it was raining and all workers could not work. My fellow workers were all taking a nap in the hallway when our boss suddenly came and saw them. He scolded us workers for our laziness and even sacked a man who had been working for him for six years. I was really shocked by that incident. It was not usual that a migrant worker works with one boss for such long time. If it was me, I wanted to be treated like a family or friend. However, we’re still working labour for the boss no matter how hard we work.

Shaoyong’s attitude changed after this incident, and he asserts that migrant workers have no dignity nor guarantees when they are in the city. He moved back to his home village shortly after this incident.

Encouragement from Entrepreneurship

With the improvement to and expansion of rural roadways and means of transport, rural people’s ease of travel has increased and the urban-rural dual structure has loosened. Lin town’s cool climate in the summer attracts many residents from neighbouring cities who spend their summer vacations in the area. The combination of agriculture and tourism in Lin town has flourished since 2013. This boom was enhanced by governmental promotions and politices, and made even more attractive by agrotourism pioneers’ healthy profits. It encouraged young farmers to return to set up their own small business in this sector.

Jing Taicheng of QJ Village is 44 years old. After he married, he was working on a building site in Beijing. “Standing on the particularly high scaffold and looking down, it was the hustle and bustle of Beijing. And all these do not belong to me.” The high risk and low salary of his job gave rise to an increased willingness to return home. The county had been expanding its place in the vegetable industry since 2008, and he decided to return to take up vegetable cultivation. As mentioned earlier, agrotourism began to take hold in 2013. In response, Jing renovated his wooden house and cleaned up eight rooms in which guests could stay. In 2014, thanks to the rural development programme by local government, the outer walls of villagers’ houses have been painted and the road has been re-laid, which made the environment more attractive for tourists. “I will never go out to work anymore,” Jing said.

The demands of family reproduction, the stresses of urban life, and the appeal of entrepreneurship are the main reasons that young farmers in Lin town offered for their return to the countryside. Regardless of the primary reason, there are always multiple factors at play and most often they involve family. One interviewee told us: “I have elderly and children in the family, and I can come back to grow vegetables.” Another said: “I have made money by working outside. Now I’m satisfied to go home to open a guesthouse and stay with my wife and children.” The family-oriented ideology of rural society is a key factor in the comprehensive motivations of young farmers to return home.

Young Farmers’ Difficulties in Farming

After the 2008 global fiscal crisis, a large number of migrant workers in Lin town returned to their hometowns. At that time, the government and the county were promoting the industrialization of vegetable cultivation. Farmers who abandoned grain production to plant vegetable could receive a subsidy of 100 CNYFootnote 4 per mu for vegetable cultivation in the first year of cultivation in addition to the general agricultural subsidy of 90 CNY per mu. The vegetable industry in Lin town also engaged in sustainable development activities, and the planting area continued to expand. Most farmers in Lin town dedicated the vast majority of their production to vegetables by 2014. At the same time, the county’s agricultural bureau and the Lin town government proposed to construct a large-scale vegetable plantation as an enterprise operation. The government also established a cooperative called Shuguang as part of a modern agriculture project. Between 2008 and 2014, farmers who grew cabbages, hot peppers, and other high-yield vegetables could earn an equivalent income to migrant workers in urban areas. Moreover, the agricultural tax had just been abolished, and the nation was paying it back to farmers in the form of various agricultural subsidies. The agricultural industrial development in Lin town has become one of the driving forces to attract young people to return, which came at a time when the migrant worker market was performing sluggishly. Twenty-one of the 31 young farmers that we interviewed are engaged in vegetable cultivation, while 6 operate rural tourism enterprises and grow vegetables for family consumption. As vegetable production grew after 2014, the town’s old and small market space could not accommodate the local farmers’ large-scale and centralized vegetable supply. These young farmers were victims of their own success, trapped by old infrastructure and thwarted by poor market integration.

Difficulties in Market

Structural Risks of the Market: Planting Is Like Gambling

Some scholars suggest that agricultural developments and improvement of farmers’ income can only be realized through intimate involvement in the market (Gao 2003; Zhao 2005). The market mechanism seems to provide farmers with the opportunity to live a prosperous life, but in fact it is impairing farmers’ control over their labour. The connection between farmers’ labour input and their gain is weakened (Ye 2012). The structural risk for young farmers who engage in highly commoditized and market-oriented agriculture is the increasingly fragile relationship between labour and the harvest. Peasants have their own words for this predicament: “the result of vegetable cultivation depends on your luck,” “growing vegetables is a kind of gambling,” and “the lucky make money while the unlucky lose money.” Of the 31 young farmers that we interviewed, an overwhelming majority (28) agreed that the main issue in agricultural production was the fluctuating market prices. Farmers are unable to enhance profits by raising yield or reducing costs, and the market structure restricts farmers’ independence and initiatives. They can no longer obtain the corresponding income by controlling their own labour input or their contribution to means of production. Their income, instead, depends on others’ production situation in other locales. Nevertheless, there are not enough non-agricultural channels to support one’s family in the underdeveloped western countryside, so farmers have little choice but to stay in farming.

Peng Xing from MZ Village is 42 years old. In around 2013, he planted 10 mu of hot peppers and cabbage. In the past, only a few farmers cultivated these vegetables and Peng’s profits reflected this scarcity. The price of vegetables has declined fiercely since 2016. He has heard that farmers in other locales, including Liangshan in Sichuan province and Dingxi in Gansu province, have begun large-scale alpine vegetable production, which means he has to compete with farmers thousands of kilometres away for a better price:

Now more and more farmers are growing vegetables and the market becomes very competitive. Only when they (farmers elsewhere) are affected by natural disasters, our vegetables can be sold at a good price. Farming is too toilsome. We lose money in the sluggish market and break even in the prosperous market. We could only earn money for our labour expense. To be a farmer is not easy and interesting.

Peng’s two brothers and sister have converted their farmland into woodland. “We planted for food and clothing in the past. We know nothing about the market. Thus, we were satisfied with grain plantation even if it only had very few yields. Now it’s not the same. We need more cash income to live and feel that our input in farming should bring us more return.”

Yan Wenguang from MZ Village planted 20 mu of cabbage, of which 10 mu was from neighbours who were working in the city. Yan was asked by his neighbours to take care of the land for them for free, and he would need to return the land to his neighbours’ use once they returned.

Growing vegetables is a kind of gambling. The lucky ones make money while the unlucky ones lose money. That’s it. In the year before the last, the cabbage price was only 16 cents per kilo. I planted 10 mu of cabbages with the yield about 100,000 catty.Footnote 5 I sold nothing. All the cabbages were rotten in the ground. I even could not cover the cost of hiring labour to harvest the vegetables. Some people came to buy but the price was extremely low. At that price, the more vegetables I sold, the more money I lost. I could not understand why the price was so low. However, my children are studying at school and we need a large amount of money. Whether I’m the lucky one or not, I have to farm.

Lack of Risk Avoidance: The Marginalization of Farmers

The market is essential for highly industrialized vegetable production and structural risks are inevitable. If there are no mechanisms for market service or risk mitigation in production and marketing, the risks will be prominent in agricultural production and in young farmers’ daily lives. In Lin town, crop insurance does not cover the loss when farmers encounter marketing problems as it applies only for losses caused by natural disaster. Almost every household in Lin town purchased crop insurance annually as required by local government. When the price that farmers receive for their vegetables declined in 2015, the insurance company refused to pay out any of the farmers’ claims because of its terms.

Zhao Hongju from YL Village is 40 years old and planted 7 mu of cabbages in 2017. She also purchased crop insurance. Last year, she lost money due to the bad market price but received no compensation from the insurance company. She visited the company’s office to follow up on her request, but the staff just made excuses and she left empty-handed. “When I bought the insurance, the (county) government gave us guarantees, promising that the company would pay if we had a bad season. With the (county) government as endorser, we could not refuse to buy. Otherwise it will offend the government.”

The Last Obstacle to the Market: Lack of Bargaining Power

Despite the great infrastructure improvements in Lin town in recent years, there are still some villages that remain relatively inaccessible. The unfavourable traffic conditions in mountainous area greatly weaken farmers’ bargaining power because they don’t have vehicles to deliver their products to the market. These dual disadvantages of geographic location and traffic conditions are further obstacles in farmers’ last mile to the market. Thus, these farmers can only passively accept the low prices that external brokers and middlemen offer without feeling that they have the ability to bargain. The brokers that control the market have formed a decentralized power that controls vegetable prices.

Li from QL Village is 31 years old and planted nearly 9 mu of vegetables. He perpetually worries about how his vegetables will sell. The village has not built roads to the locations where his production team and the other two production teams are located—there are only dirt paths. “On rainy days, the paths are muddy and cars can’t move. Take my production team for instance. We have fertile land but no good roads. We can only sell vegetables when external dealers drive in. These dealers purchase at the price of 40 cents per kilo and resell at the price of 1 yuan (100 cents). We lost much profits in this circulation process.”

Lack of Organization

Difficulties with Cooperative Organizations

Joining or forming a cooperative is a common way in which farmers can reduce their market risks. Cooperatives are generally considered to reduce costs and strengthen farmers’ bargaining power in the processes of production and marketing. Cooperatives are also facing the organizational dilemma of having alienated the people they were organized to serve. They remain an effective tool for urban and commercial capital and a small number of rural elites to appropriate profits from smallholders (Feng 2014). The risks of the infinite market have also forced some large holdings into failure, bankruptcy, or even run away from the countryside. In Lin town, the Shuguang cooperative does not function as expected and it has many practical difficulties. First, for small-scale farmers, some cooperatives have become a market subject independent to or overriding the member farmers from who it extracts profits. The large holders of land and rural elites are often the beneficiaries of co-ops (Feng 2014). Ironically, the local government continues to support such agricultural organizations since supporting agricultural businesses and cooperatives is the policy orientation by the central government.

Peng in MZ Village told us that “the Shuguang cooperative has no entry barriers. You can buy production inputs such as seeds and fertilizers from the co-op with a preferential price as long as you plant and pay the annual fee to the co-op. It is 100 yuan per year.” For Peng, it is like applying for a membership card. He said that the cooperative might raise the price of materials when it resells to farmers. “The more products you buy, the more discounts you receive. It sounds like promotion. Joining in co-op doesn’t really benefit farmer.”

Consequently, cooperative organizations do not reduce farmers’ costs significantly in the production process. In terms of selling one’s product, the co-op did not function as it should. It could do nothing when the market for vegetables was depressed. One farmer told us: “In the first half of this year, the price of lettuce was only two cents per kilo. The co-op could only accept the price offered by external middlemen. It got a high fee from the dealers. As a result, they have no willingness and abilities to bargain with dealers.” Aside from prioritizing their own interests, co-op officials also confessed that they were unable to change the farmgate price of vegetables if the market price in general was not favourable. The almost total lack of an organized cooperation mechanism allowed other agents in the market to squeeze farmers.

Difficulties in Service Organization

Young farmers who engage in agriculture are short of agricultural services such as agricultural technique service and financial service. Since Lin town farmers began to cultivate vegetables in the early 1990s, they have expanded the scale of production but without consideration for the necessity of crop rotation. Farmers are swayed by the agricultural capitalization path of improved varieties of seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides. The consequences can be disastrous. The soil accumulates a large amount of bacteria and vegetables become vulnerable to disease. If you plant cruciferous vegetables, clubroot may appear. In 2017, the disease appeared on one-third of the farms in Lin town. Under such circumstances, it is essential to have access to agricultural technology services and relevant training that can prevent or treat such diseases. Young farmers are generally aware of the difficulties in obtaining agricultural technology services; the government focuses these resources on large households and enterprises rather than protecting smallholder farmers who rely on agriculture for their livelihood. After marketization, the services that had been available in the villages and the town collapsed. Individual peasants’ agricultural knowledge is insufficient in a climate where imported seeds and various fertilizers and pesticides are dominant.

Peng from MZ Village told us:

Policies now support those who do nothing rather than who farm. For example, many companies for land circulation get compensation from the government. The ordinary people get nothing … The government spent more than 700 million yuan to prepare for the cooperative a large cold storage, which can accommodate more than 100 tons of vegetables. When the market is not good, cooperatives can collect vegetables at a low price, storing them in it. And they sell them out when the price rises again. What do the farmers gain?

The young farmer Li from QL Village planted more than 300 walnut seedlings last year and more than 100 died. “Nobody taught you. And I don’t know who I can go to ask for help. The walnut seedlings got leaf curl virus. I sprayed pesticides, but there were still more than 100 seedlings dying.”

Zhao Xin, a 19-year-old from MZ village, took a chance and planted schisandra, a herb used in Chinese medicine. Zhao had trouble locating the seedlings and his search took him online. “Baidu is the most commonly used channel. Internet is not always a helpful assistant. I bought fake seeds online and it cost more than 3000 yuan.” Zhao learned this hard lesson from his own failure. His aim was to encourage villages to join him in starting a Schisandra Park, but this ambition conflicted with the plans of the village committee and the town government. The town supports vegetable cooperatives in the village because nine village cadres are shareholders, and they did not want to develop other industries outside of vegetable cultivation. As a result, the village committee compelled other farmers not to cooperate with Zhao.

With the deepening of the market economy, local governments have been gradually withdrawing from the supply of public services in agriculture such as agricultural machinery services and marketing service shifts from collectivization to levitation. Farmers with their own ideas and interests want to develop these independently. However, the individualization of peasants is also preventing them from self-organizing. Despite the changing environment, farmers retain their expectations of the local government to take a lead in service delivery. Most of the interviewees told us that they feel a strong sense of powerlessness when dealing with the ever-present market risks. Their view is that individuals alone cannot fight this struggle and believe that the government should take responsibility for organizing farmers and providing social services in agriculture.

Young Farmers’ Innovations in Sustaining Rural Livelihoods

Confronting the structural risks of agriculture and the dilemma of organizing production, it is difficult for most young farmers to shift away from traditional agricultural production and management. The rural social stratification in the countryside is also an obstacle for young people in their efforts to access diverse resources such as information and finance. In this context, some young returnees have been able to combine their non-farming and migration experiences to innovate in agricultural production in an effort to modernize and sustain their livelihoods.

Broadening Agriculture-Based Multiple Job Holdings

Local development policies oriented towards industry integration provide an important base and environment for young farmers to innovate. The industrial integration in Lin town is focused on merging agriculture with tourism. There are two advantages for such industrial integration in Lin town: beautiful landscape in Lin town and the local government’s efforts to push a “combination of agriculture and tourism” against a backdrop of agricultural supply-side reform. The unique climate and natural landscape made the Zengjia Mountains in which Lin town is located one of the top ten summer destinations in China. Every year, about 50,000 tourists escape their urban homes to spend their summer vacation in the area; the most popular period is June to September. These visitors pay to stay with locals in their homes. Some villagers saw this as an opportunity and renovated their homes as guesthouses. To stimulate farmers’ enthusiasm for engaging in agrotourism and to accelerate the tourism economy, in 2012, the government advertised tourism in Lin town through its official social media account and built samples of guesthouses for farmers to follow and imitate. Guesthouses operated by farmers gradually developed in this context, with the numbers increasing from 1 guesthouse in 2012 to 102 by the summer of 2017. Most of the newly married young farmers renovated their new houses that were gifted by their parents to include neat and comfortable rooms for urban guests.

The opening of tourism in the area also afforded young farmers the chance to adjust their agricultural production. Some young farmers deepened their “grain and vegetable” cultivation to the mode of “grain+vegetable+service.” Vegetables, grains, meat, and eggs are all local food to serve tourists. Vegetables that are often worthless in the market can make good returns when they are provided to guests as “rural food.” Guests pay for the meals cooked by farmers and sometimes buy fresh vegetables when they leave. This is not limited to cabbage—tourists are keen on all garden vegetables and grains produced locally. This interest has increased the value added of agro-products for these households and lessened part of their burden in terms of vegetable sales. Other young farmers have broadened their operations since 2016. When food safety became one of Chinese society’s central concerns, urban residents increasingly welcomed locally produced, quality food from the countryside. The entrepreneurial activities of Zhao Jun, a 26-year-old from YL Village, is a typical example.

Zhao only attended seven days of senior middle school before he had to abandon his studies and join the workforce. He relocated to Qingdao city in Shandong province where he trained as an apprentice, learning vehicle repair and cooking. He also ran a fast-food restaurant with his brother in Linyi county, Shandong province. After returning home five years ago, he took a contract position as a salesman with a telecom company. Later, he registered a small company with his brother and together they engaged in business outsourcing for the telecom company. After working outside of the village for many years, Zhao was obsessed with making money and he had become proficient at seizing money-making opportunities. After this telecom outsourcing business encountered bottlenecks, Zhao took advantage of the new tourism market and returned to his home village. He invested all of his and his parents’ savings to construct and decorate the family home as a guesthouse. Baiyun Guesthouse can accommodate more than 50 people at a time. Tourists arrive daily and the fee for accommodation and three meals per day is CNY 80–100 per person.

Zhao’s parents planted 5 mu of land in 2017 and raised more than 100 chickens and two pigs. Even before the guesthouse opened, Zhao had over 100 followers and friends on WeChat. He took advantage of this situation and began to advertise the sale of free-range chickens and local pork via social media. During Spring Festival in 2016, he took pre-orders and then collected 12 pigs from around the village to fulfil these orders from friends around the country. The price was CNY 20 per catty, which was higher than the families would receive if they sold the meat at the local market in Lin town. This successful experience of selling agro-products via the internet gave Zhao a boost of confidence.

Young Farmers’ Embedded Entrepreneurship and Its Socioeconomic Impacts

One characteristic of farmers’ grassroots entrepreneurship is embeddability, which comprises three aspects. First, young farmers depend on local natural resources and their families’ social capital, the latter of which is a distinctive feature of rural entrepreneurship. In Lin town, for example, the local climate, terrain, and environment directly determine the direction and progress of entrepreneurship. Family assets, such as houses and land, also play an important role. The pioneering actions of young farmers are deeply embedded in the rural society. Second, farmers’ entrepreneurial actions depend upon family support and family farming. Zhao’s successful agro-product enterprise would not have been possible without his parents’ farm or their family home. Farmland maintained by parents and unpaid family labour support all contribute to young farmers’ livelihood innovations. Thirdly, the entrepreneurial actions of young farmers are deeply embedded in the “acquaintance society,” which refers to a reliance on interpersonal relationships. In Zhao’s case, he accumulated abundant social capital during his time working away from home; he developed a market in acquaintances, both friends and former customers. Most of the visitors to his family’s guesthouse are referred by Zhao’s friends.

Embedded entrepreneurship is most prevalent among young farmers who have recent migration experience. With their monetary savings, social networks, and new skills accumulated during migration together with their family’s agricultural foundations in the village, young entrepreneurs are able to deepen and broaden small-scale family farming in order to sustain their livelihoods and those of their families. On the micro level, the primary change is the increase in farmers’ incomes, which in turn encourages more young people to return home. This reverse migration has also reinvigorated the countryside, slowly remedying the problem of the “left-behind” family members as well as starting to fill the gaps in the agricultural labour force. Virtually all of the operators are young people. The local government has applied strict standards to regulate food safety and service quality to protect the tourism industry, and young people have more easily adapted to this new environment than the older generation.

Thirty-eight-year-old Yang cultivates 2 mu of vegetables, but it is not enough to support her family. She and her husband left the village for three years to find employment. Their youngest son, who was 12 years old at the time, was a left-behind child who remained at home to attend school. When the market for migrant workers declined, Yang and her husband followed the tourists back to their home village. They have registered a guesthouse business licence with the county’s Industry and Commerce Bureau and are renovating their house. Yang was very happy to return. “Now I can take care of my son. He’s no longer a left-behind child. He’s going to enter into junior middle school. Our staying will make him more concentrated in study. All our family can stay together.”

Moreover, their entrepreneurship has positive impacts on regional rural development. It reflects the re-grounding of agriculture in an agroecological sense. These young farmers have managed to establish themselves in a new market—catering to urbanites’ desire for healthy agricultural products. The farmers began to consciously reduce their use of fertilizers and pesticides, adopting the concept of ecological farming as much as possible. This important conversion is also one step towards solving the aforementioned soil bacteria problems that accompanies extended monocropping. Their entrepreneurship also facilitates urban-rural integration. As the migrant workers return to their home villages and more and more urban residents visit the countryside, the relationship between rural and urban is morphing into one that is increasingly organic. Rational communication and human interaction start and accelerate the process of urban-rural integration.

Conclusion

Among the fruitful studies in Chinese academia on agrarian transition and farmers’ dynamics, perspectives of young farmers and their experiences are mostly overlooked. Although some researchers have paid attention to young farmers and examined the youth perspective, their focus was on elite or special groups, such as elite young peasants in Liu (2017), landless farmers in Xu’s study (2008), and young farmers related with gang in Deng’s (2011) study. With regard to young farmers’ entrepreneurship, existing research concentrates on young farmers’ economic foundations earned from non-farming activities rather than their agricultural activities.

In this context, this chapter explored the characteristics of young farmers engaged in agriculture from a more general perspective. Through in-depth interviews with 31 young farmers engaged in industrialized vegetable cultivation in western China, this study found that there are significant differences in mindsets of passive young farmers and of returning migrants. They should be distinguished in researchers’ studies and the process of policymaking. However, when they stay together in the countryside and live by agriculture, both groups of young farmers need to confront the market’s structural risks and predicaments of organizing production. These have negatively impacted the livelihoods and development of young farmers. With the advancement of urban-rural integration and the changes in rural society, young farmers, especially those with migration experiences, have begun to actively utilize environmental advantages and entrepreneurial resources to innovate in agricultural production and management. This is a breakthrough against the aforementioned risks and predicaments. Young farmers’ entrepreneurship has an apparent embeddability. It provides them with a relatively stable market, minimizing risks for young farmers in the early stages of their venture. Most young farmers who return home do not expect riches but do for livelihood reasons. Their adaptation has generated obvious economic and social impacts, providing substantive ideas for improving farming, young farmers’ situations, the agricultural sector, and the problems that plague rural areas.