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Until recently, Chen Tao (@陈涛哥在成都) worked at Alibaba, a Chinese Internet company, as an in-house censor deleting inappropriate postings. Now, he drives six hours every weekend from his home in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, up into the mountains to the north of the city to purchase wild mushrooms, free range eggs and organic honey.Chen founded Nanxiachun Ecological Farming (@南夏春生态农业) in 2011 with his friend Liu Zhihong (@江鸟飞天) to sell organic countryside produce via direct home delivery to a few hundred families in Chengdu. Liu started this business out of concern for food safety for his child. He is bankrolling Nanxiachun with the profits from his successful cosmetics business. Chen and Liu have already spent one million RMB (about US$160,000) on their business and have yet tosee any returns, but the two entrepreneurs are undeterred.Nanxiachun is just one of hundreds of entities around China entering the organic farming business. Organizations like Share the Harvest and Little Donkey in Beijing, and Tony’s Farm in Shanghai run urban farms and farmer’s markets, while experimenting with community supported agriculture (CSA) cooperatives and buying clubs through selling produce online and over social networks. Some initiatives, like the Beijing Organic Farmer’s Market, have seen tremendous growth meeting the demand for safe food from China’s middle class. The fair began in 2010 as an art project, and now boasts more than 60,000 followers on Sina Weibo and grosses 10,000RMB weekly for farmer-producers.These urban farmers represent the latest development in a back to the land movement that arose in the 1990′s outside China’s most developed cities. Back then, urban nostalgia for country living gave rise to rural bed and breakfast hotels and restaurants known as nongjiale (happy farmhouses), and the model proved very successful in raising rural incomes. The model reached a peak in 2006, marked by a visit from Hu Jintao, then China’s president, to the “original” nongjiale outside Chengdu and the announcement of the slogan to promote a “New Socialist Countryside,” incorporating “multi-functional” and “ecological” agricultural methods to increase productivity and establish clear standards for green and “hazard-free” food. But local governments used rural tourism and ecological farming as an excuse to remove farmers from their lands and sell land use rights to developers, while massive conglomerates like the Wanda Group and COFCO snapped up land from peasants with small plots.In the past few years, the problems of food safety and pollution in China have become more acute than ever. Now, the city folk are taking the idea of organic farming more seriously; Chen is a perfect example. But Chen faces major hurdles, such as guaranteeing the organic pedigree of his produce.- See more at: http://www.tealeafnation.com/2013/04/chinas-organic-food-cooperatives-must-overcome-trust-deficit/#sthash.yQJjnOVM.dpuf