#On the day the temperature had not dropped below freezing, I met Wang Zipeng on the outskirts of Beijing. I was impressed by his thoughtfulness, or workplace temperament. At the time, he was sending several town leaders away. With his freshly trimmed flat head, he stood in the doorway and smiled and waved at the departing car until it disappeared at the end of the road. Wang Zipeng told me that the place where we stood was a place for ancient southerners to enter Beijing to participate in the palace examination, and was later named "Qingyundian" by a high school Xiucai (taking the meaning of "Qingyun Zhizhi"). Nowadays, there are no talents in Qingyun store, and some are vegetable and vegetable farmers. This is the place with the highest concentration of facility agriculture in Beijing. Facility agriculture refers to greenhouse agriculture in which a piece of land is covered. Wang Zipeng, who appeared in Qingyun Store, was not tall, had little meat on his face, and was tanned. He is also a vegetable farmer. But apparently, this vegetable farmer is different. In the early 80s, Wang Zipeng was born in Huma County, a small border county in the Daxinganling region of Heilongjiang Province, and he was the first generation of only children in Northeast China. In the first forty years, Wang Zipeng was a "volume king", a decent person who conformed to the mainstream evaluation system. In the first few years after graduating from college, he would change his resume and submit his resume every week to confirm his competitiveness and pricing in the market. In the nearly 20 years since graduation, he has stayed in Shanghai, and then settled in Beijing, where he worked as a TV station editor and director, a newspaper reporter, and later transformed into a company as an assistant to the chairman and a marketer. Today, in Qingyundian, 40 kilometers away from downtown Beijing, in a narrow private house, an electric pot with chicken legs, potatoes and rice is hot on a simple stove, and Wang Zipeng's mother has just placed a pot of cold cucumbers on a folding table. Standing in the simple "canteen", Wang Zipeng said embarrassedly: "The conditions are simple, don't dislike it." Mom raised her eyebrows and said, "I never thought he would be a farmer one day." ”Everything is there to follow before the turning point happens. Perhaps growing up in the Daxing'an Mountains, where water and grass flourished, Wang Zipeng's dream as a teenager was to become a wildlife expert, but when he got to university, he still studied journalism. Dreams are buried deep in my heart and never forgotten. Raising a palm-sized beetle, observing the droppings of a young eagle, planting a sweet nectar tomato for a bumblebee, and watching the moth feathers are all moments of "flow". He raised plums, moonflowers, and orchids, as well as delicate alpine civet algae and water lilies. 
Wang Zipeng's "hatched" green-tailed silkworm moth Now, Wang Zipeng has changed from a lover of animals and plants in a commercial house to a "vegetable farmer" in Qingyundian. And it all started with planting a tomato plant. Why are the tomatoes we eat now not as good as when we were younger?Like most people, Wang Zipeng has thought about this problem. Today's tomatoes have a kind of muscular fitness, but whether you bite into it or stir-fry it in a pan, it is difficult for beautiful tomatoes to burst out with sweet juice, and people can only look for the long-lost "tomato flavor" in the tomato sauce. Wang Zipeng once thought that the tomato became unpalatable, probably because he was too full to eat, and it was difficult to be pleased by a tomato. It wasn't until the epidemic was in home quarantine that he began to grow tomatoes by himself again and again. It takes three to four months to raise seedlings, plant them, bear fruits, and then feed them into people's mouths. Tomatoes are much easier to grow than alpine civet algae, the former requires a constant temperature of 18 degrees Celsius throughout the year, while the latter's living environment is very close to that of human habitability. The most important thing is the ideal lighting. Wang Zipeng planted tomatoes on the south-facing balcony of his home, and chose a large green mountain pot with good drainage and ventilation (a kind of flower pot with holes in the bottom and side walls to form a sieve), equipped with loose and mineral-rich soil, and then put in a large amount of fertilizer such as fermented cow and sheep manure, defatted bone meal, and Aolu. The planting method is to bury vines with coiled stems, and organic fertilizers such as seabird phosphorus fertilizer are applied, and even entropy-preserving paving (in order to reduce soil evaporation and maintain soil moisture). What started as one tomato was soon increased to more than 30 varieties, and by the third year the number reached 120, including Pink Star, Honeycomb, Sweet Aperitif, Chinese Velvet, Red Robin, Purple Kid, Alice's Dream, Colorful Feathers, and so on. "The names are all good," Mr. Wang said. 
The balcony tomato seedling tomatoes bore fruit, and he took them to his colleagues and friends to taste, and the reaction of everyone surprised him a little. You know, in the past, Wang Zipeng also shared the fun of breeding with others, and he talked to people about how interesting it is to harvest ants on a large scale and marry flying ants. But excuse me, what is a harvesting ant?What is a wedding flight again?It is difficult for ordinary people to understand his happiness. Tomatoes are different. This easy-to-obtain fruit carries a common memory of the times. is like the red tomato lying in the stainless steel basin in the movie "Tangshan Da**", it is not only a prop that shows the imbalance of the mother's love for the sisters and brothers, but also silently plays a wake-up function, quickly allowing the audience to return to the old time at the end of the last century - after all, who was born before the 00s, who has not nibbled on a juicy raw tomato in the hot summer?This juicy soft-fruited tomato, after the turn of the millennium, was gradually replaced by a hard-fruited tomato. The advantages of the latter are good appearance, strong disease resistance, high yield, and resistance to storage and transportation, in a word, good economic value. However, with the improvement and development of hard fruit tomatoes, tomatoes have also lost one of the most critical genes that express their soluble solid flavors, and thus lost their taste. The brandy tomatoes that Wang Zipeng planted on the balcony at that time were actually the "heirlooms" of soft-fruited tomatoes. In the face of this tomato, "you don't need to say anything, everyone can open the conversation". The office was suddenly blown open by a basket of tomatoes, and someone said to Wang Zipeng, this is the taste of tomatoes I ate when I was a child!Some people agreed, yes, I haven't eaten it in years!Some people also talked about "I want my grandfather to support ...... on the third line back then."”
Juicy soft-fruited tomato cross-section: All people resonate with tomatoes. "I suddenly felt that growing tomatoes was a meaningful thing and that it also had commercial value. Wang Zipeng had a bold idea - to grow tomatoes. Like many post-80s young people in small towns, Wang Zipeng also took root in big cities through the college entrance examination, and his ambition to realize his personal value has always been strong. Late one night in the summer of 2021, Wang Zipeng returned home from overtime as usual. It was about one o'clock in the morning, and before he could sit down at the door, he suddenly felt that something was not right, his chest was suffocated, he had difficulty breathing, and his heart rate was chaotic. "I was quite composed, I quickly called 120, 120 said it would take 40 minutes, asked me if I could wait, I said I can't wait. Then, he used his phone to make a drip, and he felt like throwing up, so he stuffed a towel and a vomit bag into his bag. When he went out, Wang Zipeng's waist could no longer straighten up, and he was less than ten meters away from the elevator. When he climbed into the back seat of the car, he was curled up and trembling all over. Taken to the nearest hospital and laid down in an emergency room, he was not very conscious. "I was very scared, and I faintly heard a very distant voice, as if a doctor was saying: What has this ST wave become?Rescue a heart attack. After the condition stabilized, the doctor told him that your gallbladder was full of stones, the stones were blocked, and the heart could not stand it and caused a heart attack, so it would be good to take out the stones, and asked, "Did you stay up late?"At that time, Wang Zipeng worked in the marketing center of a company, not only responsible for connecting with customers, doing projects, but also doing media work. The team is not enough, one person is used for three people, and they are busy every day. Wang Zipeng was so busy that he often didn't care about lunch, and even "my workstation is here, and the water dispenser is one meter away from me, so busy that I don't have time to fetch water to drink." The stone that triggered the heart attack eventually drained itself. Wang Zipeng also returned to the workplace. Everything seems to be business as usual, but it is as if it is no longer the same. At that time, he was almost forty years old, and looking back, he felt that he seemed to have been living a very tight and anxious life, "From graduation to work, I was a very 'rolly' person, I always wanted to have more control and want to take charge of my own life." When he was in college, because he "wanted to be better professionally", Wang Zipeng also minored in Chinese in addition to journalism, and attended classes on weekends. After graduation, Wang Zipeng successfully entered Oriental TV and worked as an independent producer and director in the large-scale events department and variety show department. didn't stay for too long, he felt that the variety show department was flashy, and what he did was more of a flashy thing. He took the initiative to transfer to a newly established channel to change the environment, but the new channel only broadcast large-scale translated films or symphonies. "Modern people are very tired, no one watches this kind of sunny and snowy thing, and the ratings are only a few tenths of a percent. In that era when the income was king, Wang Zipeng's income was also discounted. The TV station is stable, but Wang Zipeng is not a person who is comfortable with the status quo. "At that time, I felt that I had come out to work, and I wanted to have a better income in Shanghai and realize my personal value. In order to always control his position in the market, Wang Zipeng changed his resume every week in those years, and deliberately submitted his resume at 12 o'clock before going to bed on Sunday - so that he could see his resume first when he went to work on Monday. 
Wang Zipeng's workstation.
In this way, more than three years after graduation, he seized the opportunity to enter the print media. In 2010, he left Shanghai and went to Beijing, the media base. **After seven years in the industry, he successfully transformed and jumped to a listed company as an assistant to the chairman, and then worked in the market for a few years. He has a pot of hydroponic tulips at his workstation and can pull out a simple bed, and he says he "can add classes that others can't." It can be said that at every step of his career, Wang Zipeng has a sense of control and strives not to deviate. But even though he is the "king of workplace volumes", Wang Zipeng has also been burdened with "unrealistic" ideals. In 2002, he was admitted to university, and a university in Kunming had a major in wildlife and nature reserve management, which Wang Zipeng called the first ideal major in life. Since kindergarten, Wang Zipeng said that he has only one dream: to be a scientist. What scientists?Animal and plant scientists. Wang Zipeng watched a documentary about the "emotion" of plants, using scissors to cut the leaves of a plant, and the bioelectric signal activity of other plants around it will become strong;Seedlings sown in the same Alocia tree will be "humble" in absorbing nutrients;Large trees deliver their own nutrients to their own saplings ......Wang Zipeng is fascinated by this connection and interaction between plants"Our human emotions are delicate and rich, and so are the plants, they are full of affection and communication, but the medium and expression are different." This obsession with nature at the bottom may come from home. Wang Zipeng's hometown of Huma County is located on the northern border, across the Heilongjiang River from Russia. There is water on three sides, mountains on one side, mixed forest needles and broad-leaved forests, the ecosystem is very intact, it is the hometown of salmon, roe deer, snow hares, ferrets, and reindeer can be seen. In winter, a pheasant can be pulled out of a tree hole - "It is frozen, it doesn't have a heartbeat to the touch, it is thrown on the ground, it makes a bang, and after a day or two it can run on the ground." He described it as a "grand luxury." Huma County is not big, Wang Zipeng often played by the water when he was a child, and he could see all kinds of fish, as well as dragonflies, damselflies and other insects. Oh, and the black earth—"The soil was loose with particles, oily black, and when it rained, the water vapor steamed with the fragrance of the earth, and the air was very fresh." Nature and ideals are so attractive to him, but in the face of reality, small-town youth still have to weigh the pros and cons. "At that time, there was no environment like this, and there was no professional employment guidance, and as a result, no one could answer the question: what can I do when I come out after learning wildlife conservation, and what kind of income can I have?His family persuaded him to learn a good job first, and when he had money in the future, he could still do what he liked when he was old and retired. He thought it made sense, so he studied journalism and embarked on the journey of "King of Volumes" all the way. In fact, he has been silently raising his ideals in a small house. When he was in Shanghai, he visited the flower, bird, fish and insect market and saw a small eagle in a cage, "very distressed", so he bought it home. He fed it beef, watched its droppings, and saw that it was a little full-fledged. Until one day, when the eaglet grows up, he opens the window and the eaglet flies away, and he is not sad at all. "I don't seek to have it, I'm just curious about it and want to know about it. From Shanghai to Beijing, he has raised countless species of flora and fauna, and his home is a miniature museum of nature. 
Wang Zipeng's family raised a palace guard, with big eyes, a very ** problem. Home farming, as fun as it is, is still a long way from the dream of being a plant and animal scientist and exploring and protecting new species in protected areas or rainforest areas like Xishuangbanna. Later, Wang Zipeng admitted that that ideal came from his youth, when he lacked understanding of the world, and was very pure and idealistic. As he grew older, he came into contact with firewood, rice, oil and salt, learned about the business world, and gained insight into the world, and he had a better understanding of the realization of his own value. He said that the meal should be eaten one bite at a time in order to slowly reach those pure or grand issues. Before planting tomatoes, to be more precise, before getting a stone and a heart attack, Wang Zipeng had two entrepreneurial experiences. One project is to provide health management services to enterprises, and the other project is to feed cats at home. The latter's idea is based on Wang Zipeng's own needs: "Every time someone goes out on a business trip or vacation, I am very anxious, I want to go but can't, because I have a room of animals." He found that there are many young people who have pets in Beijing, and when they leave the house, they will be sent to boarding schools or pet hotels, where animals are prone to stress reactions and may also transmit viruses, and the home is the best environment. To this end, he designed a service process that not only feeds the cats, disinfects, provides observation reports, but also helps customers purchase coffee. "There was a lot of demand, but then the pandemic hit and the project couldn't move forward. "Continuous entrepreneurship made Wang Zipeng see the possibility of doing something on his own. And the balcony tomato planted by chance is a ray of inspiration that pierces the braincase. In 2022, Wang Zipeng began to carry out tomato seedling planting from a commercial dimension, and resigned half a year later to register the company and devote himself to it. This is definitely not a whimsical idyllic experiment. Before going to the field, Wang Zipeng did a round of research, and he found that growing tomatoes has a play: the self-sufficiency rate of vegetables in Beijing has dropped from 26% in 2008 to 8% in 2022. During the pandemic, Beijing also proposed to achieve a self-sufficiency rate of 30% in the future. The data gave him a signal – "I immediately felt, what's this growth?".It must be growing organic food. He also found that there is a lot of policy support for agriculture, such as building a greenhouse, and the state will subsidize 50% or 60%. 
Later, inside the completed greenhouse, in the winter of 2022, Wang Zipeng ran around the park. As a result of running down, he found that the quality of Beijing's land was not good. What makes a good land?There is a documentary about taking a 1.7 meter bamboo pole and inserting it into Japanese soil, and the bamboo pole can be completely pressed into the ground, "Think about how loose the soil is." At that time, Wang Zipeng thought that he must raise the land well when he grows vegetables in the future. In the end, he chose the land of Qingyundian. Before sowing seeds into the ground, the ground needs to be turned up. At that time, the film of the greenhouse had not yet been covered, and Wang Zipeng called a small combined tractor to turn it over seven times, with a depth of 30 centimeters. Every time he turned over the soil, Wang Zipeng picked up the garbage once, and finally picked up sixteen bags of garbage on this 1,000-square-meter land. At night, there was no light, so in order to pick up things, he hung an LED light around his neck, like a big bell, and the children of the farmers saw him like this and called him "Uncle Cow". "There's really nothing to pick up in the land. In addition to the bricks and rubble, Wang Zipeng also picked up the skull of a puppy, a broken kitchen knife, large pants, old shoes, pickled vegetable bags, and plant root ...... that grew with plastic black-hearted cottonThe surrounding farmers didn't understand this behavior, and told the new vegetable farmer that the land is like this, it's normal, you don't have to worry about it, and the vegetables will grow if you plant them. But Wang said: "I want my land to be cleaner. He didn't throw away any of these "field garbage" (several of them were thrown away as "garbage" by the enthusiastic foreman), and he felt that through them "you can see the lives of people who used to work as farmers in Beijing." On the other hand, perhaps because of the acumen of the ** people, this garbage is also reminding him that land protection is a topic worth paying attention to. Using these "cultural relics" unearthed in the field, Wang Zipeng held a "field archaeology" exhibition in a bar in the city. The exhibition continues, and the field farming is also progressing in an orderly manner. According to the word "field", the greenhouse is divided into four functional areas: tomato cultivation and variety purification, balcony agricultural scene experience and nature study, demonstration planting, and crop seedling. Every inch of land is well planned. Most of the area is reserved for tomatoes, and every square meter of soil in the rest of the space is planted with speckled basil, alpine strawberries, sorbet (a kind of black hornwort), miniature bananas and mangoes, golden silk** and Lanzhou lilies, Geisha coffee, duck feces oolong and German hops, Yunnan red roses and saffron, Yuanzhi and shoot dry, Ezo onions or Munich spinach. There is also an area named "Mint Promenade". Dozens of kinds of mint are planted on the narrow ground of only ten meters, tear the leaves of each mint, smell it, and you will find that durian mint is like green arrow toothpaste, strawberry mint is sweeter, pineapple mint has a hot fruit flavor, and cologne mint has a strong soapy feeling suitable for perfume. The greenhouse not only grows a variety of "cash crops", but also puts a large number of ecological insects and associated plants. For example, the blue-crowned thistle with blue-purple hairy flowers is not only a typical plant of the genus Asteraceae, but also a symbiotic plant of the California small mites. "In the fields, we stock predator mites to control insect mites such as spider mites, and at the same time provide pollen for these carnivorous mites as food rations, and they maintain this symbiotic relationship in nature. "There are bumblebees, geckos, seven-star ladybugs, heterochromatic ladybugs, Chinese giant lacewings, broad axe praying mantises, Chinese giant knife mantises, and red love victory earthworms," praying mantis is the top predator in the field, and ladybugs are small experts in eating aphids, and the predation efficiency is very high, and aphids cannot develop at all." 
In the field, the praying mantis is the apex predator, and Wang Zipeng is full of pride in everything in the greenhouse. There is a fish tank in the greenhouse, in which a Mexican newt is kept. It is also called a hexagonal dinosaur, with a domineering name and a cute appearance, it is an amphibian that looks like a fish and a lizard. The hexagonal dinosaur needed to live in dechlorinated water, the water temperature should not exceed 25 degrees Celsius, and the water in the tank should not be less than two-thirds of its body. Wang Zipeng said that it is an indicator creature, and if this little thing has no problem living in it, then the water in the greenhouse is not a big problem. There is also a light ** in the greenhouse, Wang Zipeng said, ** can stimulate the vascular hormin of the crop, which can grow better. Winter goes to spring, the cycle goes on and on, and in a blink of an eye, Wang Zipeng has been a full-time "vegetable farmer" for almost a year. Often running to Qingyun store, Wang Zipeng figured out how local vegetable farmers made money. His neighbors usually grow loofahs, and after the loofahs are harvested, they start to plant small vegetables, that is, leafy vegetables, such as fast vegetables or Shanghai greens, and then plant loofahs after planting small vegetables for half a year. Take side dishes as an example, side dishes can generally be sold for 1 yuan 6 per catty in supermarkets in Beijing in spring, and 2 or 3 yuan in Hema in spring. The vegetable vendors collect vegetables from the vegetable farmers, and the purchase price of the land is only 1 or 8 to 2 cents. When the vegetable vendor transports the vegetables from Qingyundian to Xinfadi, the price of the vegetables will double to 5 to 6 cents. In this process, the vegetable vendors will not only lock the price but also press the account period of the vegetable farmers, which is to sell first and then settle the bill, and the loss of vegetables is also bet on the vegetable farmers. If the vegetable seller pulls 600 catties of vegetables and sells 400 catties, they will ask the vegetable farmer: "Am I pulling the 200 catties back for you or throwing them away?""Many of the people who grow vegetables in Qingyundian are outsiders, mainly farmers of the generation in the North China Plain such as Henan, Hebei, Shanxi, and Shandong. Wang Zipeng said that they did not have a license plate from Beijing, so they could not use a large truck to transport goods to Xinfadi, so they could only sell vegetables in this way. "So the farmer is actually at the end of the whole chain, a very passive unit of production. "With such a small profit, vegetable farmers can only rely on chemical fertilizers and pesticides in order to make more money and improve the production efficiency of greenhouses," he wants to reduce costs and make the land more productive, so the land is also very dry. "Traditional farmers have too little say in the circulation of vegetables, so Wang Zipeng decided to take another path. He raised the land, collected soil and bacteria from Xiangshan and Enshi, put them into dun barrels and fermented them with molasses, collected deep-sea fish offal from sushi restaurants and coffee grounds from coffee shops, and returned these nutritious "urban waste" to the landIt also introduces earthworms, rat women, horses, jumping insects and other decomposers to continuously improve and enrich the greenhouse ecosystem and avoid the burden of pesticides. 
Wang Zipeng, who works in the fields, produces organic vegetables, spices and tomatoes in the greenhouses, mainly for restaurants, bars and ordinary consumers in Beijing. He does order agriculture and balcony farming, the former is that the customer makes an appointment for demand first, and he then produces;The latter is to provide some potted plants, soil and other solutions, so that people in Beijing can also have their own vegetable plots on their balconies. His tomatoes will sell for 128 a catty, and basil for 220 yuan a catty. The reason why it can be sold so expensive is because of the unique germplasm and the tight variety, and because the organic germplasm is healthy and green. Wang Zipeng grows a kind of custom-made spinach for 70 yuan a catty, and the people who come to buy it are all new parents - they make this expensive organic spinach for babies who can just eat complementary food. Wang Zipeng said that the growth cycle of these spinach is 100 days, "some parents buy it back and make it, my mother eats it, and my grandmother also eats it, and they say that the spinach is sweet and will continue to buy it here." Before I met Wang Zipeng, I never knew that there were so many types of tomatoes. In 2022, he planted 386 varieties of tomatoes alone, and this year this number has risen to 504. Last year, Wang Zipeng also held several tomato tasting activities, and some people exclaimed at the scene, "This tomato tastes curry." Among the 386 types of tomatoes, the one that was voted for the most similar taste to the tomato when I was a child was the "tin tomato". In addition, Chaoshan water chestnut, xiao long bao, and orange brandy received higher votes, which are all soft-fruited heirloom tomatoes. Iron sheet and Chaoshan horseshoe are old varieties in China, iron sheet has been planted in large quantities in the north of China, and horseshoe has been cultivated in large quantities in the south. 
The tomatoes in the field are not yet ripe, and Wang Zipeng's personal favorite tomato variety is called Chinese Velvet. He described this variety of tomato glandular hair as well-developed, very cute and fluffy, dignified plants, very "Chinese red" fruit color, bite the skin, and the taste is very strong. Every day when I wake up, there's a whole lot of stuff to do. In the summer, the comfort of working in the fields is very low, and he loves to sweat, often taking a "sweat bath" while working. Not only does he have to bend down like a farmer and put his hands in the dirt, but he also has to take on the role of a CEO, finding customers, doing promotion, staring at posters, and planning offline events. In the process, he had moments of tiredness. I have been disappointed in the quality of cultivated land, anxious about germplasm resources, headaches for the quality of agricultural products, supply and demand, storage and transportation, and uncomfortable for farmers' low income. "I think it's time for people to focus on agriculture. Everyone is comfortable thinking that agriculture is still the way it was in the old days, not knowing what is happening at the moment, and not thinking about every meal and vegetable on the plate. But the land still gave him something in return. Since planting tomatoes, Wang Zipeng has invested 800,000 yuan, and last year he earned more than 200,000 yuan in the state of part-time work. It's not just the money that gets the most. In more than a year, he learned electric welding, using an angle grinder, repairing door locks, painting and can climb five or six meters of greenhouses. "The joy of learning is to relentlessly explore and understand all things. "Maybe it's because of more sun exposure and adequate vitamin D intake, Wang Zipeng's mood and posture are much lighter, and he has lost 30 pounds of overwork in just one year. Beijing experienced a low temperature in December, when he heard the news that the weather was about to warm up, Wang Zipeng was very happy, "The resilience of agriculture is very great, and the thousand-year-old lotus seeds can still sprout, so make a choice and move forward." "We would like to thank the documentary "This Can Make Money" team for their support and help during this interview.