China: Food Security & Left Behind Children

How applying a Western model to a Chinese social problem didn’t work

11 min readApr 3, 2019

Excerpt

Most people look to those that have done the thing they’re trying to do for inspiration and guidance. China is different. It takes inspiration, but it will take one aspect and extrapolate it to its extremities (take manufacturing as an example or property development). It moves different and is governed by a completely different set of rules.

For a while now it has been hypothesised that China is trying to emulate the Western model of industrialisation, this view is naive because it disregards the 5000 years of history behind it and the extremely deep cultural bonds that have formed over this time.

Stability and longevity are paramount to Chinese culture—past, present and future.

Background

This is a case study outlining a project called MoFarm, which was done during my time at Mandala Group.

I contributed to the team as the project lead. This meant I was responsible for assembling the team, organising research trips and communicating with stakeholders to gain access to the regions and people we were researching.

As a team we utilised several techniques found in IDEO’s Human Centered Design Field Guide. Techniques such as immersion, interviewing and guided tours.

This project spanned a six month period where we visited a series of small villages on two separate occasions for a period of 10 days at a time. The villages are a two hour drive outside of Huaihua, Hunan and are set amongst a sprawling and sparse landscape.

The village we focused on encompassed six farms.

The Problem

Mandala Group builds sustainable businesses around social issues—the social enterprise model. For this project we were contacted by a local entrepreneur, Fred Young.

Fred Young was born and raised in Hunan and is the founder of Rainbow of Hope. Rainbow of Hopes mission is to increase the incomes of the farming families in his village to combat two problems that have devastated the region; food security and Left Behind Children.

Food Security

In recent history Chinese food scandals have rocked the media and caused trust in China’s domestically produced food products to decline.

Stories like the counterfeit baby formula scandal (baby formula that caused babies to swell or bloat as if they were growing, and then die of malnutrition) or gutter oil (which is the re-using of oil for food production found in the side streets and sewers) have only furthered this decline.

These scandals like this are not contained in a silo, they tarnish the entirety of China. Domestic consumers are looking internationally for safely produced food.

Left Behind Children

Because of China’s rapid economic development, wage disparities between urban and rural areas have grown large. Parents see this as an opportunity to provide a better life for their family, so they move to where the work is, leaving their children behind, usually with grandparents.

The rural areas typically have sub-standard education and social systems. In addition, children going through their formative years without their parents disrupts their education, physical well-being and ability to develop healthy social relationships.

There is an estimated 69 million left behind children.

Fred and Rainbow of Hope are tackling this problem by connecting rural farmers with urban city dwellers, allowing direct communication between the two parties and the exchange of pesticide free fruit, vegetables, meat and eggs.

So far Fred has focused on one farm in particular; that of Mr Yang.

To date, Fred has helped Mr. Yang connect with six separate families in Shanghai, who purchase a range of products from him. His income was less than $200 per year before this connection and now it is over $1200, a 600% increase.

The Project Objective

Fred engaged us to discover how this process could be applied to other farmers in the region.

In particular he wanted help understanding how the farmers produced their products and how he could promote a sense of order and cooperation between the farmers.

The process we followed was:

Recruit and assemble team
Secondary research
Primary research
Ideation
Implementation
Iteration

The Team

Our team members encompassed a wide variety of roles; business minds, developers, user experience designers and translators.

Secondary Research

This phase consisted of Googling and reaching out to experts in our network. We found the following:

Family farms on average are two acres, attended to with hand tools and traditional Chinese practices.
Industrial farms were typically much larger, government run and mechanised.
A single village encompasses multiple farms that are run by members of the same family.(i.e. Mr. Yang’s village was his entire extended family)
A single farm cultivates several products

Primary Research

The key research methods we used were:

One-to-one interviews
Immersion
Guided tours

Research Trip #1

We spent 10 days living in the village and participating in general daily activities. This included harvesting rice and vegetables, preparing soil for the next season and cooking.

We also undertook a series of interviews with stakeholders ranging from children, to farm owners and labourers. The idea was to get the widest range of input to form a holistic idea of the area and community.

Some of our interviewee friends—Child, Farm owner, Labourer

Research Synthesis & Findings

The farms we visited operate on a needs basis. They produce what they need to feed themselves, selling or trading the surplus with their neighbours and feeding the remainder to livestock.

We found the following:

Yields from farming practices were very low; sometimes less than 40% of planting efforts would yield produce.
Each two acre farm housed over 20 varieties of fruits and vegetables as well as chickens and sometimes livestock.
Access to able-bodied labour was hard to find. A lot of the youth had left the villages to work in the cities.
Farmers constructed a yearly planting plan, but tended not to follow it.
Most of the farmers had cheap smartphones and access to the internet.
Farmers used WeChat to communicate.
There was a pre-established farmers cooperative agreement between village farmers, but no one had taken responsibility for the organisation of it.

Some of our initial ideas were:

Specialisation; farmers specialising their produce production
Labor swap; farmers lending a hand on each others farms
Group truck hire; cooperative members chip in to hire a truck/van and sell their goods to a nearby city

Idea Testing

The idea we settled on and took back to Fred and the farmers was to specialise. We pursued this idea because we’ve seen how specialisation works and there are models that exist which can provide guidance.

If each farmer in the cooperative chose one or two different products to produce—rather than 20+, they could produce at scale.

What would happen if each farm specialised in one or two different products?

Our assumption was that the cooperative could then band together to service Rainbow of Hopes clients. If Mr. Yang needed carrots or onions, the cooperative would supply them and vice versa.

User Testing #1

We tested this idea by running the idea past Fred and Mr. Yang—We felt Mr. Yang was a good contributor for this stage because of his exposure to the current model and success with it.

The feedback we got was met with blank stares and tight lips. Fred elaborated.

A farm nearby to here was producing chickens and nothing else. One year they encountered plague and were unable to sell any of the chickens or their eggs, in addition to needing to replace all the chickens on the farm. The farm was rendered helpless and made very little income.

The reason each farm had so many varieties was for stability; financial and sustenance. One variety could fail and they would still have food to eat. But if they only had one type of vegetable and had a bad season or the soil was contaminated or any number of things went wrong, they would have to seek help and they wouldn’t be able to provide for their family.

The farmers would lose face. This was an uh-huh moment.

Local pigs that provide manure and farmers

Pivoting and moving forward

So far we had learnt that stability and certainty was paramount to these farmers. They couldn’t afford a negative bump in their supply chain. They were older and less willing to adopt drastic changes.

Perhaps in hindsight it was a heavy handed solution, and one not well thought through. It was an idea heavily rooted in our own beliefs and a lack of clear cultural understanding.

We went back to the drawing board and reassessed our notes, looking at them from this new stability angle.

The Solution

From our research we had identified that produce yields were low and each farms planting plan was wasn’t followed. A planting plan consisted of a few hand written notes and a rough guideline of when to plant and harvest produce.

We found that the plans were generally not adhered to because they weren’t consistent with reality. The soil was bad and crops often took a long time to grow.

Many of the seeds were low quality and wouldn’t germinate. They were unsure what vegetables and fruits should be planted together to ward off bugs and create growth synergies.

In times when seeds would fail to germinate, leading the farmers to replant which pushed their planting plans further off kilter. Each farmer did their own thing; reacting to the ups and downs of their crops.

The fundamental issue was organisation

With this in mind we focused on developing an interactive management tool using WeChat that gives simple reminders, tips and weather updates to farmers.

We decided to go down this route because the farmers:

Understand how to use a smartphone
Have access to a smartphone
Use WeChat daily
Have consistent and stable access to the internet

How the solution solves the problem

Again, the two problems are food security and Left Behind Children.

We believe this solution begins to solve both of these problems as it changes a cornerstone habit in the farmers. Organising their farming practices will lead to a clearer understanding of what is being produced on each farm. This will lead to higher clarity in what produce is doing well and what produce isn’t.

This will then help yields increase, sparking a higher amount of produce eligible for sale, and therefore raising incomes enabling those parents who are away from their town for purely wage reasons to return.

It indirectly pushes the food security narrative as Fred on-boards new farmers who now have surplus produce to sell to Rainbow of Hope, enabling them to build relationships with urban families and a trust based relationship begins.

User Testing #2

We travelled back to the farm to test our prototype which consisted of simple wireframes. Our objective was to test:

Do the farmers understand the purpose of the prototype
What information should be prioritised at this early stage

We tested by sitting down with the farmers on Mr. Yang’s farm and asking them to walk through the prototype and explain their thoughts as they went.

Insights

The prototype was too complex! We were trying to change too many habits at once.
“Why do I need tips, I already know how to farm?”
“I can tell the weather when I wake up. “

Farmers weren’t looking for outside help. They considered this their business and their problem to solve. If an interactive management tool was our end goal, we needed to break down the steps into smaller chunks in order to get there.

Improvements

From this feedback we decided to strip it right back and try two things:

Printed planting plans—Laminated and written on with a whiteboard marker that removed the barrier of a printed hard copy, and allowed the farmer to adjust his sowing and harvesting dates.
WeChat messages—Send daily tips and check-ins to each farmer individually to keep their crops in the forefront of their mind and inspire action.

Measuring Success

The project scope did not make it past this iteration but a few ways we could have measured the impact of these incremental solutions are:

Is the planting plan being filled out and adjusted when necessary?
Did a certain producers’ harvest date correspond to the farmers planting plan?
Compare before and after produce yields

Reflection

If I could synthesis this project into one key takeaway it would be this

Just because one model works in one place, don’t assume it works in another.

Things I would do differently:

Test cheaper—before jumping into developing wireframes and conducting in-person usability testing we could have had pen and paper prototypes.
Leverage existing technologies. WeChat had built in functionality for our core value proposition—sending tips and reminders.

Conclusion

To wrap up the project we hosted an event at Impact Hub Shanghai to share our findings and insights with the social enterprise and natural food communities.

At the beginning of this project an assumption I had was that China was trying to emulate the West. I extrapolated this from its copying nature that it has become known for. This project has shown me a different side.