The soil at Longyun Farms is alive with sunshine and rain and living organisms. Soil is the lifeblood of the farm. We know the only way we can truly be sustainable farmers is to make the soil healthier through our farming methods year after year. At Longyun, we use conservation tillage to reduce erosion and increase the organic matter, cover crops to return nitrogen to the soil, annual soil tests to guide our crop-specific nutrient management programs and rubber tracks or wide tires wherever possible to reduce soil compaction.

Longyun sees innovation as a key tool to improve soil, energy use, water, biodiversity and food safety. We are constantly looking for innovative ways to use technology and will continue incorporating creative, sustainable ideas into our farming practices. For example, in 2010, Longyun will introduce the first biodegradable bag in frozen fruits and vegetables. And, using GPS-guided tractors, we are able to cultivate with ever-increasing accuracy, reducing synthetic farm inputs and diesel fuel usage.

We strive for the most efficient irrigation possible. From a technical standpoint, we use drop tubes on our linear and pivot irrigation systems to reduce water losses due to evaporation and drift. We also use drip irrigation to provide water directly to the crop root zone. We continue to improve our irrigation scheduling techniques, using weather, soil moisture and evapo-transpiration data to track water use and needs.

Shenglong Modern Farm, a national leader in sustainable agriculture, operates a first-of-its-kind Biological Compound Plant by producing fertilizer from fruit and vegetable byproduct. The cutting-edge plant supports Longyun's goal of minimizing its heavy-metal footprint and gaining fertilizer independence through the creation of a recyclable, on-farm fertilizer source. A recent innovation in China, and most commonly associated with dairy farming operations, anaerobic digesters have been creating organic fertilizer in Europe for decades.