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Beijing, China - We'd been driving for an hour and a half since leaving central Beijing when the car suddenly slowed to a halt. "This isn't exactly where the GPS told me to go, but I think it's the place," says the driver. I look out the window and see a simple wooden archway leading to a plain, one-storey building. The facade is bare except for some words painted in black capital letters. "Who is your farmer? Where does your food come from?" it reads. I've arrived at Shared Harvest, a 2.6-hectare farm located in the countryside 70km north of the capital, to meet Shi Yan, its founder and CEO. This is one of two Shared Harvest farms; the second is located in Tongzhou, half-an-hour away.Yan greets me warmly, wearing a knitted green cardigan and long purple scarf. "Sorry I'm late. It's busy now because of the conference," she says. Opened in 2012, Shared Harvest is not only a completely organic farm, it was also one of the first in China to follow the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, where consumers buy meat and vegetables directly from producers. "We painted the question on the building ourselves," says Yan, "because in CSA, that is the core question." Thirty-three-year-old Yan is a trailblazer in Chinese agriculture. As a young student at Beijing's Renmin University, she was concerned about the widespread environmental damage being caused by chemical-reliant farming practices, such as soil degradation. In 2008, she travelled to the US to intern at Minnesota's ecological Earthrise Farm and to see CSA in action. Being community-focused, CSA farms are run under organic or biodynamic principles. A key element of CSA is its shared risk, membership-marketing structure, which helps to financially protect farmers while linking them directly to consumers."I was searching for a real-world solution to this problem," says Yan. "But it changed my life. It wasn't only a workable business model, it's a lifestyle." Shared Harvest is the result of what Yan learned during her six-month stint at the American farm, which covered everything from farming methods to member management. And the farm is not only her workplace, it's also the place where she held her wedding. At Shared Harvest, Yan walked down the aisle carrying a bouquet of broccoli instead of flowers and fed her guests dishes made from food grown on-site. Today the farm supplies fresh produce for its 500 members living in the city. "A lot of people don't know where their food comes from. It's a world far away, but CSA is about relationships. It's important for consumers to understand and build a relationship with farmers," says Yan. When she first started Shared Harvest, few had heard of CSA. Now, there are more than 500 CSA farms in China. This month, Yan helped organise the sixth annual international and seventh national CSA conferences, which took place in Beijing. The farm prides itself on natural alternatives to synthetic pesticides. Instead of synthetic fertilisers, farmers use ash, hot pepper, and tobacco water to treat crop diseases, such as leaf spotting. Farmers can spend half a day picking bugs off plants by hand, and on the rare occasion that crops are infected beyond repair, the team simply rips them out and starts again.Yan tells me the key is managing the soil quality. "Take humans, for example," she says. "If you're healthy when you get a cold, you're able to recover naturally and faster. With farms, the most important thing is healthy soil. If the soil is carefully maintained, then the diversity and quality of the produce is also good and you can deal with problems better." WATCH: Pesticide-free Farming in India & Eco-friendly fashion But finding natural solutions can be tedious and labour-intensive, with some problems requiring weeks of individual attention. Unsurprisingly, Shared Harvest members pay a premium upfront for their weekly delivery. Supplies of vegetables, eggs and meat cost roughly three times more than that sold at ordinary supermarkets. It's expensive, but Yan believes 40 percent of Beijing residents can afford green produce. "It requires a different mind-set," she says. And it's not only the consumers that Yan hopes to convince. She's equally determined to educate Chinese farmers about organic practices. "We have to understand the mind of the farmer, and using pesticides is just like smoking. They're addicted to it," she says. Pesticides were first introduced in the 1970s, and quickly became a mainstay on Chinese farms thanks to easy access, low regulation and government subsidies. The agricultural industry gorged itself on chemical use in order to increase and maintain food output to sustain a growing population. However, the environment, and ultimately the consumer, paid the price. After the famine experienced during the Cultural Revolution, "China was terrified of being hungry," explains Wang Jing from Greenpeace East Asia. "But now, the situation has changed, and we are witnessing 11 consecutive years of grain increase. Now, the concern is environmental damage and food safety." This year, China was ranked as one of the world's worst safety violation offenders by the American food consulting firm, Food Sentry, which noted that pesticides were a major problem. Laboratory testing found that 32 distinct pesticides were found in Chinese foods, mostly produce, fruit and spices. A variety of studies have found a link between pesticides and a wide range of health problems, ranging from headaches and nausea to cancer and endocrine disruption. American research released in 2009 showed strong links between agrichemicals and birth defects. But Greenpeace East Asia says that, while Chinese consumers are highly aware of food safety problems, awareness about environmental impact is low. "Pesticides have polluted more than 100 million mu of arable land, that's more than six million hectares. And those pesticides have entered into the waterways and accumulated in the soil, and are even present in the air," says Wang. But, she adds, the long-term implications for food production are equally as alarming. "The northeast region of China is known for being the most fertile, famous for what's called 'black soil'. But now, this region is losing one millimetre of black soil every year due to water, wind and meltwater erosion. And it takes 300 to 400 years for this to form naturally."
