The Store for Premium Local Products (exhibition hall) was officially established in December 2005, although the idea for the project can be traced back two years prior to that. What the concept of 'Premium Local Products' boils down to is fostering types of food products traditional to the local area, which were grown without pesticides, chemical fertilizers and feed additives. Farming has a hallowed history in Guangxi Province, and, indeed, it is a region known for its diversity of  categories of agricultural products and bumper crops. For example, there are numerous traditional types of xianmi or long-grained, non-glutinous rice, which through a long process of cultivation gradually adapted perfectly to the complicated climatic and environmental conditions of the area. But although very tasty, production volumes are comparatively small. After cultivation of hybrid rice types became general so, too, did increased application of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, resulting in high crop outputs. As a result, the growing of traditional types of wet paddy rice gradually died out, along with the taste of rice which many people remember with fondness. Only some individual farm households have refused to abandon the traditional varieties of grain passed down to them by their ancestors, growing a certain amount each year for keeping a stock of seeds and home consumption. The local poultry is also renowned for its fine taste, with some varieties being derived from the wild fowl domesticated by the Zhuang minority living in the mountains. These birds usually prefer to perch on tree limbs and run away so quickly that they usually cannot be caught during the daytime.

At first Zhou Jinzhang and his associates were drawn to these households by the delicious foods they produced. They loved to enjoy themselves in the mountains, where the local people delighted in entertaining guests and were sure to offer them their home-brewed rice wine, local chickens and fresh vegetables. They would discuss local customs and farming, while offering news from the city, and they would make sure to leave behind what they deemed fair compensation before they departed. Thanks to these encounters, they made friends with the locals, and they were also able to bring along their own relatives and friends on these recreational excursions. Although these random incidents did not appear exceptional, in and of themselves, they helped establish a firm foundation for further interaction with the local people. After encountering the Community Support for Agriculture (CSA) methods, they thought that they, too, could do something along these lines in Liuzhou, namely the Store for Premium Local Products (exhibition hall) concept. It might be better to say that they did not formulate this concept with their minds, but rather that it was a product of their experiences.

A first baby step out of chaos
Their selection process began at the village level, and the establishment of a CSA system was intimately tied to their own individual experiences. Zhou worked for an advertising company, and had carried out advertising in villages near Liuzhou for the Liuzhou branch of China Mobile Telecommunications. His job made it all the easier for him to promote Friends of the Land and indulge in his interests in the rural culture of the area, so he developed a good understanding of how the peasants thought, and also became quite familiar with their customs and various aspects of farm work. Luo worked at the same advertising company as Zhou and enjoyed photographing natural scenery during his leisure time. Peng was the youngest of the three, and an avid hiker. Prior to establishing the Store for Premium Local Products (exhibition hall), they had frequently gone to the mountains together.

Then, too, many of their relatives and friends enjoyed these same kinds of activities and often joined them in trips to rural communities, where they enjoyed the home cooking of the farmers. When ready to leave, they would buy fresh eggs, rice, fruit and other local products to take home with them. Nor did they have to pay anybody to make the arrangements, since they were self-supporting and shared expenses. The arrangements for these forays into the countryside were quite casual too. The organizers set up a chat room on their Internet website, and after the timing of a trip had been settled upon, anyone who wanted to join that particular trip could just sign up. After the number of participants was settled upon, Zhou and his colleagues would then make the transportation arrangements and contact the farm families they planned to visit. With more and more participants signing up, the largest of these self-organized jaunts came to number more than 70 participants. Those who had cars went in them, while families that did not have their own transport doubled up with those who did, chipping in petrol money in return. From these activities they came to recognize that a love of farm communities was not just the thinking or sentiment of one or two of them. Liuzhou itself is a center of heavy industry. Industrialization has brought with it serious environmental pollution, and in this city where the machine is king basic ties of mutual trust at the person-to-person level have largely been lost. Thus, rural life provided a very refreshing contrast for the visitors. They would sit in homes with which they had no previous connection, while their children fed little animals, and the adults sat around the children, sipping tea and chatting with their new country acquaintances. Many participants after taking part in just one such activity returned with their relatives and friends. And sometimes they would skip going with the main group and make their own arrangements in terms of time and the friends who would share the adventure of such a visit to farm households.

Of course, discord that could not be readily papered over was inevitable on some occasions. For example, some people upon arriving at a farm household would declare it dirty, or there would be failures in communication. Furthermore, some of the visitors did not show respect for the hard work of the farmers, and could be quite wasteful when eating. Then, too, some of them did not show good manners to the farmers, taking advantage of their modest and unassuming manners to boss them around. Faced with these kinds of situations, Zhou and his colleagues would on the one hand bring up such problems in the chat room of their website, thereby providing a kind of mirror in which the participants could see their real selves. Moreover, before undertaking such organized activities, they would brief all the participants on the actual conditions in farm communities, and thus prepare the participants psychologically for the experience. After a few instances, these kinds of regrettable behavior steadily declined in numbers.

In this way, the three, little by little, formed their own community, with its own distinct communal values and culture. To put it another way, within comparatively natural conditions they established a community which supported agriculture on a miniature scale. Trust between the Friends of the Land group, cooperating farmers and the cooperative purchasing groups within the city was firmly forged through these kinds of tangible activities. In addition, through these activities they came to recognize an important opportunity relating to the work, namely that the demand for trips by members of the urban public to rural communities was irregular, but that since eating was an integral part of daily life, this portion of the demand was stable.

People who experienced eating at a farm household all agreed that the rice, vegetables and poultry consumed by the peasants themselves was tastier than that sold in the markets. One key reason was that the farmers did not use much pesticides or chemical fertilizers in the plots from which the food they themselves consumed came from. So although their produce might not be as visually appealing as what appeared in the city markets, it was far superior in terms of taste and nutrition. Consequently, many visitors to the countryside made sure to purchase food products to take back with them when they returned home. After participating in one visit, many people could not be sure when they might have the time to repeat the experience, but they still wanted to savor farmhouse cooking. This situation is what gave birth to the Store for Premium Local Products (exhibition hall) concept of Zhou and the others.

How the urban cooperative purchasing groups became involved
When domestic environmentalist groups speak of creating communities to support agriculture, one is apt to get the feeling that their greatest concern is to create stable cooperative purchasing groups. On the one hand, within China, widespread consciousness of the need to protect the environment has yet to take hold, and city dwellers are not clearly aware of the dangers involved with the use of large quantities of agricultural fertilizers and pesticides in food production. On the other hand, we have seen the fraying of basic ties of trust between members of society. Nowadays, whether it is in the industrial sector or agriculture, making money is the name of the game. Naturally people harbour doubts like, 'If we can't monitor the production of the agricultural products you offer, how can we be sure that you do not really use fertilizers and agricultural chemicals?'
 
The strategy of the Liuzhou Friends of the Land was to win the recognition of the city's cooperative purchasing units of the ideal of healthy eating and the traditional culture of farm communities, creating opportunities to directly experience and imbibe the rural atmosphere, promote mutual interchanges, and establish trust at the individual level. From when they first started taking friends to the countryside to enjoy themselves until after they had established the Store for Premium Local Products (exhibition hall), Zhou and the others organized venues for tasting fine local farm products, and invited farmers to come to the city to participate in face-to-face interchanges with the country. For them, all these activities were more fun than work.

They paid a great amount of attention to the details. For example, they made up a great number of bamboo tally slips and when they helped a farm household sell its farm products, they would mark down the name of the farm household and the place and time of the sale. This method, together with their activities in the villages and their organizing of the interactive meetings, helped consumers to come to understand clearly whose farm products they had bought, how they had been grown and even how the rice a given household produced really tasted. Thus, they used their own local products approach which suited this small farmer economy, rather than a certified green products or similar approach which might have been more appropriate if there was more capital involved.

This approach was particularly suited to Liuzhou since it did not have any environmental protection groups or mass groups concerned with the environment, but there was a market for healthy foods and for personally experiencing farm life. It was the members of the Friends of the Land who provided the key impetus for the creation of an entity providing community support for agriculture. They had been raised amidst the local culture of Liuzhou and had a deep attachment to the natural environment and culture of the area, and were eager to find ways to transmit their love and ideals regarding these things to others. At the same time, I also discovered that they acquired the know-how to take existing methods for community support of agriculture and employ them to give concrete expression to their love of the land. For example, they now are very cognizant of the importance of preserving diversity of traditional farm products in a given area to the development of community support for agriculture.

Forming common interests with the farmers
In everything from the Store for Premium Local Products (exhibition hall) to the Liuzhou Friends of the Land, Zhou and the others were keenly aware that the crux of their work was to form a unity of interests between themselves and the farmers. Two things were usually in the farmers' minds. One was the risk or concern that the products which they had raised would fail to sell. The second was that all their hard work might yield them little additional profit. In addition, an objective factor that needed to be dealt with was the fact that the ties of personal trust that had once existed in the countryside had been destroyed. Reviving these ties of trust would necessarily take time to develop by an accretion process through daily work together. Zhou and his cohorts came up with a number of effective responses to these three problems.

One was to persevere in showing tolerance for the faults of others. For example, prior to last year's New Year (Spring) Festival, after receiving orders from collective purchasing groups in the city, they went to the villages to buy local poultry, but contrary to the previous practice of providing them with all free range fowl, the farmers included several birds which had been raised on artificial feed. They paid the regular price for local chicken for the birds, and the next time that they went there to buy poultry, they did not single out the farmers in question for criticism. In this fashion, they were on the one hand able to avoid a direct confrontation, while the farmers were able to see how the chickens they raised would indeed be bought, and they thereby developed the confidence to continue raising chickens for sale. At the same time, this process aided the farmers in getting a real feel for the thinking and ways of doing things of Friends of the Land.

In order to help the farmers to get a better grasp of the situation, Zhou and his colleagues frequently visited markets. On one occasion, they discovered that local rice paddy rice of the traditional style was being sold. They therefore visited the farmers who had grown it in the countryside and asked them to refrain from using fertilizers and pesticides, but to sell this kind of rice in its natural form directly to them. Since it is now accepted wisdom among farmers that if you do not use fertilizers and pesticides your crop output is going to diminish, the farmers felt concerned that they were at risk. Later, members of Friends of the Land discovered that these same farmers were raising pigs. Since the killing of pigs for making sausages had been a common practice in Liuzhou, they took some of their friends from the city to visit these farmers to experience a 'visit a country home, kill pigs, make sausage and enjoy the New Year' experience in the countryside. As a result, the pigs sold for more than Rmb200 each. Needless to say, this served as another confidence-building measure. In this way, the process of returning to traditional methods of rice cultivation was smoothed considerably.

You also need to take into consideration the very real hazards that farm households face. Farmers tend to be convinced from their own experiences that a simple written agreement is not enough to protect their interests. In regards to the raising of farm produce, one approach that Zhou and the others experimented with was to propose providing the farmers with cash subsidies ahead of time so that the farmers would be assured of getting the normal price for their crops. But in return they were adamant in their requests that the farmers completely avoid the use of fertilizers and pesticides. In regards to the raising of farm products, their approach was to scout out the best local chicken raised with traditional methods and spare no effort in proposing suitable arrangements with these chicken farmers, so that after these birds began producing eggs they would come to buy them on the spot. Since the prices they offered were higher than the going market prices, the farmers were more than willing to sell to them. In this way, the farm households avoided any great risk. Neither side demanded a written contract, but having dealt with each other over a long period of time, they had been able to establish a working relationship based on mutual trust. For example, it was two years ago that the Friends of the Land had first started dealing with the farmers who they have contracted to provide them with eggs this spring. They scouted them out from Sanjiang and Yushuilu, and gave 20 or so superior quality chickens to these farm households. After two years of natural increase, and thanks to the suitable environment, the households in question today have over one hundred birds, which each day produce approximately one kilogram of fresh eggs. They have also won a high degree of trust among the cooperative purchasing agents in the city with which they deal, who are therefore willing to pay comparatively high prices for eggs which are guaranteed to be of high quality. Consequently, nowadays the supply of local eggs cannot meet the demand.

Another important aspect has been that Zhou and the others have been eager to grasp the economics of small-scale agriculture. Based on the needs of the farmers and demand from the cooperative purchasing entities, in addition to the articles that it emphasizes itself, the Store for Premium Local Products (exhibition hall) has sought to help farmers' cooperatives sell the charcoal, bamboo shoots, sweet potato flour and other products they produce themselves.

Grasping the essentials of small-scale agriculture
The services of Friends of the Land are oriented towards small farmers, and one of the key characteristics of small-scale agriculture is the integrated nature of production. The farmers sell products in excess of what they need for their own daily lives; in other words, the surplus after they have ensured self-sufficiency. Moreover, when the Friends of the Land purchases agricultural products, it considers not just the needs of the cooperative purchasing entities in the city with which it does business, but also whether or not the farmers should really be selling the products in question. In this way, there is a definite logic to the selection of products for sale at the Store for Premium Local Products (exhibition hall) as well as distinctiveness. A visit to the store following the New Year (Spring) Festival revealed that the products from small farms on sale included tea oil, long-grained rice, local chickens and eggs (both from chickens and ducks), cured meat, charcoal, woven bamboo articles and sweet potato flour. 
 
Turning to another interesting special feature of small-scale agriculture, let's next consider the role of barter in farm communities. For example, farmers might buy chickens to rear for their meat or eggs, out of what one farmer referred to as his 'cookie jar'. And a farmer who raises vegetables for his own dinner table might decide that he wants to buy one of those chickens the first farmer had been rearing. He therefore might send him a few onions, a bunch of spinach or other fresh vegetables, and since farmers would consider such things as lacking monetary value, the gift will just be considered as a friendly gesture. Compare that to the obsession with money in today's commercial economy, where buying and selling are intended to make money, and money is something attractive and magical. But the situation prevalent in the villages embodies the essence of trade, which is to make the lives of people easier and more comfortable.

In addition, unlike the overall quest by Chinese agriculture to pursue economies of scale through industrial methods, small-scale farmers are looking for effective production, which is not synonymous with speed of production. On the one hand, with small-scale farming, with the exception of the labour component, the inputs of means of production are all comparatively small. For one thing, they do not use pesticides and fertilizers, and local producers depend on their own knowledge of disease resistance and suitability to the local soil and climate, which results in stable crop outputs and sustained production. Moreover, farmers use the grain which they themselves have grown to feed their chickensﾃδ｢ﾃ｢窶堋ｬﾃつｦIf we are talking about a farm household well experienced in production techniques, then the inputs of the means of production required for this kind of production system is relatively small. Furthermore, because of the CSA same-place consumption system, some of the farmers living rather to close to Liuzhou use their own vehicles to transport small quantities of their produce directly to the exhibition hall, which reduces the transport expenditures. On the other hand, markets are aware that agricultural products produced by small farms fetch higher prices. Food produced without chemical fertilizers, pesticides and artificial feed simply tastes better than run-of-the-mill output. For example, the purplish red long-grained rice I ate in Liuzhou was aromatic, chewy and truly delicious. It sold for about Rmb3.50 per kilogram.

This way of doing things would not appear to offer any advantages in the integrated buying and selling system prevailing today in which the emphasis is on production volume. However, in today's society in which people are starting to pay attention to the safety and nutrition of the foods that they eat, its advantages are gradually showing themselves.

Returning to core expertise
The core expertise of the workforce at the Friends of the Land lies in their business acumen. Before establishing any programme, they thoroughly acquaint themselves with conditions in the village in question, the thinking of the local farmers and various aspects of farming in the area. Aware that they themselves assume the greatest business risk under this system, they very earnestly seek to grasp the scale and speed of development, and do not eschew difficulties in establishing a one-on-one arrangement with small farm households, pursuing their goals step by step. To put it another way, the principle that they themselves are devoted to is that of small-scale agriculture, and they believe their methods will allow it to display its superiority.

One thing they have done, on the conceptualization front, is to join with friends in jointly establishing a 'I Love Bean Curd Shop' and 'Pavilion for Tasting Superior Products from the Land'. The evolution of these projects is taking place based on the core competence of the Friends of the Land. On the other hand, through work they have done in the past they have developed an understanding about the supply-demand level generated under the present system. Furthermore, through this process they have discovered a great number of craftsmen in the villages in their region who are capable of making bamboo tables, bamboo stands, food carriers, wooden gates and tables, rattan stands and mats, etc. Friends of the Land negotiates prices directly with them, and the capital required is rather small. In fact, some of these farm households will now deal only with Friends of the Land, and this has become a characteristic of the small-scale farming self-sufficient economy, namely that the farmers make a great many of the articles which they use in daily life. This is also another way in which they can emphasize the 'land' aspect when decorating their places of business.

Basically, Zhou and his colleagues have used these methods to express their own deep affection for village life and culture. Zhou says that while walking village lanes, he is often able to discover various treasures. For example, they might be large lizards in the grass, shell fossils in the rocks, or wild mushrooms. On a road in Nashe, Luo Zehong gave me a tree ear he had plucked from the top of a tree. It is because they have lived in the villages for so long that they have been able to develop from within the lifestyle they lead, and discovered ways of doing things that fit their needs exactly. But the thing that they are looking for more than anything else is how farmers do things which will allow them to run the Friends of the Land better.

(Author: Zhu Ming, published in 'Grassroots' magazine. Translated by Qinghong WANG and John Carroll)