“What do you mean by ‘the farm is gone’?” Zhen Rui asked over the phone.

Before he got the answer, the signal vanished into the rain.

It was 4 a.m. on July 28, when record-breaking downpours struck the mountains in Miyun District, northern Beijing, part of a storm system that swamped valleys overnight. By dawn, the flood had erased his 30-hectare farm.

“Everything disappeared overnight,” Zhen said later.

Five hours after that call, Zhen returned to the farm from his hometown in the northern Shanxi province to find 13 years of labor erased: terraces had collapsed into silt, cornfields and fruit trees lay buried beneath mud, greenhouses were twisted into metal.

The same storm swallowed much of Beijing’s northern edge. Rivers burst their banks and landslides cut off villages overnight. Days later, 44 people were dead, nine were missing, and more than 24,000 homes had been damaged.

Local officials later called the floods evidence of the capital’s “inadequate understanding of extreme weather.”

By the end of September, a season of volatile weather had swept across China. Floods followed droughts, and droughts returned again, each erasing what the last had spared.

The north bore the brunt of a whiplash cycle that left officials struggling to predict, much less prevent, the next disaster. During the peak flood window from mid-July to mid-August, torrential rains pounded Beijing, Hebei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, and Gansu, accounting for nearly half of the year’s total disaster losses.

Nationwide, a season of floods, droughts, and other natural disasters affected 55 million people, leaving 742 dead or missing and causing losses of 217.7 billion ($30 billion), according to the Ministry of Emergency Management.

Floods and geological disasters alone made up three-quarters of all national damage, stripping more than 2.1 million hectares of crops from the earth.

Zhen is now among millions of farmers left to rebuild on land that no longer feels reliable.

Over the past three months he has cleared debris and surveyed what remains, uncertain how the land might recover or where the money for restoration will come from.

The only certainty, he says, is that the disaster was “a huge lesson.”

The fields around Beijing had been reshaped over the past half-century into fertile farmland. “But now, we need to reflect,” Zhen says. 

Ground zero

In his 40s, Zhen has lived most of his life in China’s arid north. “I’d only ever seen floods on TV,” he says. “I’d never felt it.”

Before the storm, the Qingshui River beside his farm was a quiet line through the valley, where Zhen hosted weekend campers and birdwatchers for extra income. Each day followed the same rhythm: up at 4:30 a.m., harvesting corn in the mist, loading tricycles before sunrise so the crop could reach customers by noon.

When he returned, a 3.9-ton tractor had been rolled more than 200 meters downstream, its cab still missing. The farm’s front gate — a stone wall six meters wide and a meter thick — was torn apart, and a 600-meter stretch of concrete road lay shattered into slabs.

The flood had stripped 30 to 40 centimeters of topsoil, leaving only silt and gravel. “The land was no longer fit for cultivation,” Zhen said. “It feels like it’s come full circle, back to what it once was.”

That circle began in the 1970s, long before Zhen arrived. His farm sits on land reclaimed from the Qingshui River’s floodplain, filled and leveled during a nationwide campaign to expand arable land.

Farmers were urged to “cut through mountains, fill valleys, and divert rivers,” a slogan that guided development across northern China until the campaign was halted in the 1980s after widespread environmental damage.

“But the spirit of that movement never really faded,” says Zhen, “the belief that humans can conquer nature, and that we can reshape the environment to suit production.”

Decades later, another movement brought Zhen to the farm, this time in search of a cleaner, more self-reliant life.

In 2012, as food safety scandals and smog filled national headlines, a “back-to-the-land” wave was sweeping through China’s middle-class and white-collar workers.

Zhen, fresh out of China Agricultural University and working at a seed company in Shanxi, was among them.

“People started asking how we should live in the future,” he says. “Or, put more bluntly, how we are supposed to survive.”

Hoping to build a life in Beijing and give his children safer food to eat, Zhen devoted himself to the farm.

When he took over in 2012, the soil was poor and sandy; he spent more than five years spreading cattle manure before it began to recover. To build a steady supply of fertilizer, he raised over 3,000 chickens and a dozen pigs, until avian flu and swine fever forced him to close the sheds.

Beyond enriching the soil, he leveled and reshaped the fields, carving terraces and laying concrete roads. Like many others who joined the “back-to-the-land” wave, he tried to engineer self-sufficiency. Most newcomers left after a few seasons. Zhen stayed.

Only after the disaster did he begin to question the past. “Maybe we need to rethink what it really means to adapt to the land,” he says. “We used to believe a good adaptation meant convenience — easy access, close to home. But now we have to think about the river’s natural course.”

Thirteen years later, the same question — how we should live in the future — has returned. The answer, he knows now, depends on a climate no longer willing to stay predictable.

Breaking point

Across China, weather patterns once considered stable are breaking apart. This year, drought parched the humid south while floods drowned the arid north, a reversal unseen since record-keeping began in 1961.

In Beijing, the rainy season usually runs from mid-July to early August. When it came sooner — and harder — than expected, Zhen assumed it was just another wet weekend. With no campers to host, he went home to Shanxi for a short break.

At the farm, two workers stayed behind. Before dawn on July 28, one was woken by breaking glass. When he stepped outside, water covered the courtyard. Within minutes it climbed to his thighs, then swept his feet away. He managed to grab a tree and climbed to higher ground.

Moments later, they reached Zhen by phone. “The river has overflowed,” they told him. “Call the police.” Then the signal went dead, and it would be several hours before the network came back.

The storm tore through Beijing’s northern districts of Miyun, Huairou, and Yanqing, the capital’s so-called “backyard garden” zone of forests, orchards, and weekend guesthouses. By dawn, roads were cut, villages isolated, and small resorts swept away.

By the time the water receded, the disaster had affected more than 300,000 residents. The city later acknowledged that forecasts had lagged and evacuations had failed.

“Our ability to forecast and warn about extreme weather events is still insufficient, and our disaster-response plans are not yet sound,” Xia Linmao, Beijing’s executive vice mayor, said days later.

For years, Zhen’s luck had held. In 2018, an unusually long rainy season ruined his corn crop and washed away a low bridge, but the fields survived. In 2023, when a typhoon drenched southern Beijing and killed 33, friends lost their farms; his in the north stayed dry.

Each time, he told himself the worst had passed, until now.

In the month after the flood, he and one local worker salvaged what they could — metal frames, broken doors, the remains of machinery. He sold the scrap for 30,000 yuan, a fraction of the 30 million yuan he’d lost.

He reported the damage to local authorities, but compensation remains uncertain. After the 2023 floods, Beijing allocated 16.2 million yuan to restore 1,260 hectares of farmland. Zhen’s 30 hectares alone cost twice that.

In the weeks after the flood, officials promised faster recovery, simplified insurance claims, and “basic restoration within one year.” Subsidies were announced for damaged farms, and authorities began drafting a plan for long-term “high-quality development.”

On the ground, the math looked different. The government offered to cover half the cost of rebuilding greenhouses and warehouses. “A single greenhouse costs 300,000 yuan,” Zhen explains. “We’d still have to cover 150,000 ourselves. But right now, after the disaster, when operations have practically stopped, how can we possibly afford that?”

“I’m not saying the government has to compensate us. This was a natural disaster, and they’re not obliged to. It’s just a really difficult time for us right now,” he adds.

He hadn’t bought crop or property insurance; the annual premiums were simply too high. “Farming already barely makes money, so I hesitated to spend tens of thousands every year on something that almost never happens,” he said, before adding: “I guess I still underestimated climate change.”

Full circle

Since the disaster, Zhen has spent his days clearing debris, meeting with local officials, and answering messages from worried customers. Everyone asks the same thing: “What’s your plan next?”

After weeks of weighing what was left, he decided not to rebuild on the original site. Instead, he reached a temporary deal with another farm two kilometers away. It sat on higher ground, spared from the worst of the flood. The farm lent him its greenhouses and fields; in return, Zhen connected them with his existing clients.

By September, his corn — the farm’s signature crop — was growing again on borrowed land. If all goes well, it will be ready for harvest in 85 days. For now, that’s the nearest hope in sight.

The government, too, is rethinking how land should be used as extreme weather intensifies. As early as 2021, “farmland rendered uncultivable by natural disasters” was listed among the main causes of China’s shrinking arable land.

“If the land is no longer suitable for farming, then don’t force it,” a top local official told Zhen. “Keep it as it is — maybe it can serve another purpose, like tourism.”

By year’s end, China’s national land survey will reclassify plots based on actual use. If Zhen’s fields are ruled unfit for crops, they’ll be redesignated as forest or grassland until the soil recovers. The survey is part of a national effort to protect the total area of arable land, a key benchmark for local officials.

Local authorities have also pledged to review the area’s river channels and embankments to create a more resilient flood-control system, “in line with the demands of climate change and future development.”

“We’ll probably have to wait for the government’s updated plans,” says Zhen, “and combine that with our field studies before deciding where to start again.”

Still, he refuses to walk away, even if it takes years to bring his land back to life.

“I feel responsible for this land. And I feel connected to it,” he said. “Even if we can’t farm it the same way anymore, maybe we can leave something — a reminder, or a lesson — for those who come after.”

For 13 years, the cornfields have filled and emptied, again and again. When the seasons turn, the corn will rise once more. “There must be another year,” says Zhen. “And the corn will grow again.”

Editor: Apurva.

(Header image: Crops lie flattened after floods in Miyun District, Beijing, Aug. 1, 2025. VCG)