Fish out of water

However, farming is far from a simple task for those who are new to it and imagine it is all about pastoral scenes, fresh air and a quiet life communing with nature.

When Liao Lijun felt exhausted at her reporter's job in Shanghai last year, her father offered her an attractive invitation: to run a farm with him.

While working in the real estate development sector in the early 2010s, Liao's father secured a 133.3-hectare parcel through farmland transfer at a low cost.

The 25-year-old is familiar with the internet and has always wanted to be a social media creator. Producing content related to farming taps into the current online zeitgeist.

When she arrived at her father's farm, located in a village in Huaihua, Central China's Hunan province, in October, it quickly dawned on her that running a farm is nothing like the idyllic pastoral lifestyle she envisioned it would be.

"The key problem is our agricultural inexperience," Liao says, adding that farm life is not as "beautiful as it looks", and that farming is a business full of challenges and difficulties.

Sharing her agricultural endeavors on video platform Bilibili, her posts are reminiscent of Clarkson's Farm, a hugely popular British docuseries on Amazon Prime that follows former motoring journalist and TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson as he attempts to run his Cotswolds farm himself following the retirement of his veteran land manager. "After all," he asks in the first episode, "how hard can it be?"

Liao certainly knows the answer. "Our farm has encountered various unexpected obstacles, which is indicated by my delay in uploading my videos," she says. So far, she has managed to post 10 videos to her Bilibili channel.

The third day after she arrived at the farm, the temperature in Hunan dropped dramatically, from 38 C to 18 C. Overnight, more than 100 fish in her pond died, and she had no idea why. After consulting an expert on the farmers' assistant hotline, by dialing 12356, low oxygen was determined to be the cause.