Chinese sprout an interest in organic farming amid concerns over food safety
Increasing affluence and food safety scandals are prompting people to seek more direct links to farmers - and even to start their own farms
A visit to a farmer's market last September changed Wang Jianjun's life forever.
"At the market, I read material on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms and that same month I went to Beijing to visit those farms," Wang said.
Upon his return, Wang, an engineer at a state-run company in Yunnan , quit his high-paying job and rented nearly 5hectares of farmland in a suburb of Kunming . In June he picked his first harvest.
The term Community Supported Agriculture originated in the US in the 1980s, inspired by a farming movement that began in Switzerland in the 1920s. A similar system, Teikei, developed in Japan in the early 1970s.
CSAs connect farmers with consumers. A community of individuals covers the cost of the farm operation and farmer's salary in return for organic produce. China's first CSA, Little Donkey, was established in Beijing by Shi Yan, a PhD holder from China's Renmin University, after she spent six months working on such a farm in the US.
Shi, who has left Little Donkey and runs another farm, Shared Harvest, said CSA farms started to spread in 2011, and there were now more than 500 in China.