In the winter of 2006, Gao Qingrong made her annual Lunar New Year trek home to the family farm, near Chengdu, Sichuan province. She was in for a surprise; her parents had turned a small corner of their farm into an organic experiment.
'I was immediately against this,' she says, squatting down to examine some vegetables. 'I thought it would be too much work.'
A few days later, Tian Jun of the Chengdu Urban Rivers Association (Cura) stopped by and gave her a translation of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, a 1962 book detailing the negative effects of pesticides on the environment - and on birds in particular - in the United States. The book sent shockwaves throughout the US five decades ago and is now beginning to have an impact in the mainland.
Gao, a 38-year-old who dropped out of high school to look for work in Jiangsu province, says the book was a revelation.
'It was frightening. As soon as I finished reading it, I completely changed my mind,' says Rongrong, as she's known to family and friends. 'From that day on, I have never let my parents use chemicals on our land.'
Gao quit her factory job to stay at home and help out. She then convinced her brothers to do the same - a minor reversal in the mass urbanisation of the nation - and the family began transforming its four mu (0.2 hectares) of land into an exclusively organic farm. The Gaos and a handful of like-minded farmers in Anlong village, a 40-minute drive from Chengdu, are now at the forefront of an expanding, albeit still small, trend in China.
Hit hard by a string of food scandals in recent years - milk tainted with melamine, pesticide-laden chives, string beans that were found to be toxic, tainted pears and reused cooking oil, to mention a few - mainland consumers are becoming more focused on the quality of the food they eat, creating a market for organic produce - essentially that which is grown using only naturally produced fertilisers and non-chemical means of pest control.