Pig shit. You probably don’t think much about pig shit. But Mr. Liu? He thinks about it a lot.
Liu runs an organic farm in Shunyi, and he’s giving us a tour. After walking us past fields of organic vegetables, he points out his pigs, which are playing around in the mud. This being a farm, we ask if they’re there for bacon. But they’re not.
“We don’t buy animal-made fertilizer because we can’t control how the animals are grown, so they might have chemicals in their bodies,” says Liu. “The only animal shit we can use is the stuff we get ourselves.”
That’s right – even the excrement is organic. Which leads us to why we’re here: we’re here at Liu’s farm to see just how much it takes to run an organic farm in Beijing. In short: a lot.
It’s a hot, sunny day at summer’s tail end. Liu has been outside tending to his fruit and veg since the early morning. He walks us through his fields, stopping to point out each plant, occasionally grabbing a sprig or two for us to smell and, on occasion, eat. We taste spicy wasabi leaves straight from the vine, and sniff Liu’s homemade organic pesticides. Turns out there are ways to keep insects off your plants that don’t require harmful chemicals.
But Liu’s guiding philosophy, we learn, is more than farming naturally. Liu has two children, and after years of hearing about food-safety scandals in China, he took matters into his own hands.
“I wanted my family to eat healthy,” he says. “I have two kids, and I was worried about what they eat.”
Today, Liu works with customers in central Beijing, where he still lives despite running the farm in Shunyi. He supplies to a growing number of Beijing restaurants, as well as TRIBE, where he also sells produce as part of the restaurant’s weekly farmers' market.
And despite growing demand for his product, Liu makes sure he gets to know the people behind every restaurant he supplies to – and that includes TRIBE. It’s time-consuming, but it’s what makes him a truly community-minded farmer.
It all goes to show that Liu takes this shit seriously. Literally, we suppose.
This advertorial appeared in the October edition of That's Beijing. You can try healthy dishes made with Liu's produce in-store at TRIBE (see Listings for details).
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