(Ed. note: IATP's President, Jim Harkness, is blogging from China as he meets with experts on China's food and farm system)
Monday, Sept 24
Today I visited the operations of DeRunWu Organic and Natural. I got their phone number from a friend, a restauranteur who has purchased their salad greens for over a year. When I got through to the owner, a Mr. Ji, he said he’d be happy to show me the farm but suggested we meet at their store, which is easier to find, and go from there. The store is on a dusty road in the patchwork of urban sprawl and cornfields on the way to Beijing International Airport.
Arriving early, I had a chance to chat with the young store clerk before Ji showed up. Only on the job a month or so, he is already a touchingly earnest convert to organic food. I ask how he likes working for an organic business and he said, “It’s wonderful!” And then, with a dramatic gesture sweeping his hand across his face, “They’ve torn away the masks!” When I looked puzzled, he explained that most people hide their problems, cover up bad news or talk behind other peoples’ backs. “Here if something’s wrong we have to acknowledge it and deal with it.” I asked what this has to do with organic farming, and it was his turn to look puzzled. “For the supermarket, they use pesticides on the vegetables and wrap them up and add chemicals to make the tomatoes redder. Organic food is natural, pure, honest. Some of our vegetables don’t look as shiny or fat as those in a supermarket, and some have even been chewed on by bugs, but I feel like if bugs want to eat them then that must mean they’re safe and delicious!”
I was still basking in the sunshine of the clerk’s organic moral universe when Mr. Ji and his wife arrived and he told me how he got into this business. Mr. Ji belongs to the Back to the Land school of organic farming: “I was a PhD student at Beijing Aviation University, and I belonged to a student group called Read and Till----you know, like farming and studying? We did some investigations about pesticides in food and found that there basically wasn’t any food that didn’t have some chemicals in it. So one of our teachers arranged for some people from his home village to set aside some land to grow vegetables just for us, and we agreed to buy as much as they could grow.”
Ji’s job was to manage communications with the farmers, arrange deliveries, etc. In 2002 and 2003 the students bought fresh vegetables grown without the use of pesticides or chemical fertilizers. The next year, Ji and some friends decided to start an organic farming business marketed to non-students, but after a year they had lost money and his friends quit. By this time, 2005, Ji had a PhD and a post-doc at Beijing University (the equivalent of China’s Harvard) but he was hooked on farming. He had already given away all his books and had nothing left of his academic profession but his framed diploma.
So Ji quit school altogether and he and his wife set up DeRunWu Organic and Natural, which is just finishing its second year in operation. They rented farmland near Beijing and hired locals to work for them. DeRunWu is mostly a home delivery business. Two times a week, they deliver 8-lb cloth sacks filled with “whatever’s fresh and ready” from their farm for a fixed price of about $11. (In fact, there are lots of exceptions to the “fresh and ready” rule, and Ji and his wife keep records of the preferences of different customers: no eggplant, no tomatoes, love arugula, etc.)
They also have a small store. Transport costs are a major expense and Ji hoped that having a store would persuade more customers to come to him. For the most part, this hasn’t happened despite discounts for vegetables bought in the store. “To my customers, money is no object, and they’d rather stay at home.” Those who do shop at the store can buy other organic and health foods there as well, and the profits from these products help keep the business afloat despite Ji’s determination to keep prices for the farm produce low and sell by the pound rather than charging more for high-value items like fresh basil.
Must sleep now. I’ll write about the farm visit tomorrow.
