By intern researcher Colin Jones

To explain why, in less than 10 years, a little farm expanded to include a successful enterprise that encompasses restaurants, a branded product line, an import business, and a bed and breakfast for urban escapists, Lu Hongwei says it was as simple desire for something sweet.

“From 1999, when we started this place, it was very basic,” Lu says. “We just wanted to have good fruit and try our best.

“At that time, I think I didn’t really understand marketing and whatever. It was just to say, ‘Okay, let’s try it,’ and to grow good fruit.”

From that wish grew Agrilandia, a self-styled organic farm in northeast Beijing that is both the city’s first agrotourism stop and, to an extent, a litmus test for the organic food market in mainland China.

The seed was planted in 1998, when Lu returned to Beijing after two years in Milan, Italy, where she divided her time between working as a manager at a factory and exploring the diverse terrain of Lombardy. Lu had acquired a taste for the rustic, country fare she sampled widely on her wanderings. She also found an Italian husband.

In Beijing, Lu and her husband followed tracks cut by countless transplants before them: They opened a restaurant. Tucked away on Sanlitun Street, between foreign embassies and the financial district, Peter Pan was almost an immediate success. “It was every day just full and full, (with) the people waiting for seats,” Lu remembers with a smile. “Everything was so great.”

That first year Peter Pan netted enough for Lu and her husband to lease a plot of land on the city’s northeast margin. It was there that they built their first farm.

Agrilandia moved in 2005 after the original site was expropriated for Beijing airport’s Terminal Three. Now, behind a heavy, wooden sign greeting visitors, the farm consists of 13 hectares carpeted with more than 60 varieties of fruit trees and, by Lu’s estimate, between 20 and 30 types of vegetables. Nearly all the seeds and trees were imported from Italy. The grounds also contain two breezy greenhouses that have known better days, a small lake, and a petting zoo. At the end of a dirt road connecting the farm to the highway is the main building, which begins at a flagstone patio lined with potted yellow flowers, proceeds to vanilla stucco walls and red tile roofs, and, inside the arched entrance, opens into an enormous room of sunny yellow walls, naked brick columns, and imposing mahogany joists that crisscross a two-story ceiling. Agrilandia guests enter here, check in, take meals in the dinning room, and retire to one of 22 rooms in this premiere venue for Beijing agrotourism.

Answering the whys of Agrilandia is easier than explaining how. Worldwide organic sales have boomed over the past 10 years, drawing market players from Wal-Mart to the Chinese government to enterprising novices such as Lu, who sells her goods through her restaurants and at Jenny Lou’s, an upscale grocery chain in Beijing.

According to the Organic Trade Association, worldwide sales of organic products doubled between 2000 and ’06 to US$ 38.6 billion. The market continues expanding by about US$ 5 billion per year, and is expected to maintain that pace at least until 2010. What started as a cottage industry is now a lucrative global trade.

China’s share of the international organic market is about 9 percent – a significant portion that the government is working hard to grow by offering subsidies and dispatching agriculture experts to the countryside to teach new, pesticide-free farming techniques.

Lu has benefited from both government measures, which may be why she’s an enthusiastic supporter of a Communist Party line: “From our government, we say, ‘Organic is from China!’ America and Europe, they’ve run organic farms for more than 30 years. But organic is originally from China.”

While this may be a suspect historical claim, it can be backed up with hard numbers if the scope is limited to the present. In 2005, about 978,000 hectares in China were either certified for organic production or in the process of being so, according to the environmental group Worldwatch. That puts China on a scale second only to the United States in terms of organic growing capacity.

But organic foods grown in China don’t stay long. From soybeans to rice to food industry staples such as fruit concentrate, a huge portion of the organic goods raised in China are sold in the United States, Europe and Japan, which are the largest organic product consumers in the world. China’s organic exports were valued at more than US$ 350 million in 2005 – the year for which the most recent data is available – which is more than double the US$ 150 million exported the previous year, according to the U.S. magazine BusinessWeek. And currently, Worldwatch reports, China is Europe’s main source for organic black and kidney beans, as well as pumpkin and sunflower seeds.

While most organic products from China end up in the cargo holds of ships bound for supermarkets overseas, there is also a healthy domestic appetite, fueled by China’s emerging middle class and an expatriate population that brings from home a taste for heirloom tomatoes and carrots with fronds still attached. Lu is positioned well to tap both markets.

“Most of our customers come from Beijing. We are lucky,” Lu says.

“This location for them is not hard to reach. And 15 minutes from here by car, you will find the largest homes around,” she said, referring to the Shuyi suburb with clipped lawns that roll from front doors to sidewalks. “Mainly foreigners live there.”

Like almost everyone working in Beijing’s hospitality sector, Lu and her staff expected big benefits from the 2008 Olympics held in Beijing in August. Since Shunyi was a venue for the Olympic rowing competition, Lu hoped to attract not only hungry spectators but athletes as well.

She landed a contract with the Italian rowing team that would have had her feeding and boarding a whole crew of hungry competitors, trainers and coaches every night for the duration. But the contract fell through.

“After the safety problems and whatever – you know, that period when it seemed that everyone was so nervous – we gave up the contract,” Lu says. “We said, ‘Okay. Maybe we’ll have nobody here.’ ”

In the months leading to the Games, the Chinese government clamped down on security. Visas became especially hard to get and, in response, many foreign visitors altered their Olympic itineraries, some canceling trips altogether. The rowing team contract was a casualty of this angst. Lu managed to recoup a little business from journalists and VIPs who stayed in Shunyi during the Olympics, but her August sales were well below average. The only saving grace was that those who did come returned every night, showering Lu and Agrilandia with praise.

“All the people had such beautiful opinions about us. That gave us a lot of satisfaction. For them, it was a shock that they could find a place like this, that they could find food like ours. They gave us so many compliments,” says Lu, before pausing to reflect and adding, “We miss the compliments.”

On an average day, when Beijing isn’t besieged by an Olympics and wealthy foreigners, compliments are rare. “A lot of people come here and complain. They say, ‘After dinner we have nothing to do.’

“‘This is something I cannot tell you,’ I say. ‘Be still. Stay to feel, to drink, to enjoy the nature of the farm.’”

Criticism is hard to accept for Lu, who sees her farm and its mission like a parent, through rosy glasses. To someone who views all her success as the sum product of a simple wish for good fruit, there is almost no seeing eye-to-eye with the average Beijing resident, who considers organic food as exotic excess.

Whether or not Lu can empathize with apathetic customers, she certainly knows what’s at stake.

“From my mind, from my heart, I believe the place will have a really great future because I know the marketing, I know what we can do. But we also have difficulties,” Lu says. “I put all the money here, but maybe we don’t have enough to sustain, to develop in time. So this is a difficulty. We are trying to get a loan. We are trying to get financial support, but it is really not easy.”

The restaurant is a moneymaker, but the farm and the bed and breakfast aren’t generating much. According to Lu, the whole setup – restaurant, farm, product line, and bed and breakfast –only breaks even. So she’s banking on her import business, hoping to become Beijing’s sole supplier of some big Italian brands.

Will the business succeed as she hopes? Deciding what does and doesn’t work for Agrilandia is a trial and error process, both on the business side, and for the crops. It took Lu several seasons to determine that good artichokes won’t grow in Beijing, but her pear orchard blossomed into one of the most diverse in the country.

“South of Beijing, there is another garden with European pears, but they bought all their trees from us,” Lu says with pride. “In Shandong, there are other orchards with lots of European varieties. But we have more.

“A lot of experts come to visit and tell us we have the best pears they have seen. So that’s something good. With pears you can make so many things,” Lu says. “But we need time to show what we can do.”