She Turned Dirt Into Gold Fields

Rice paddies stocked with crayfish will not take pesticide. What goes on the rice ends up in the water and kills the stock, so a field run that way has to handle insects some other way. Zhao Qingqing comes back to her village out of university to farm rice and crayfish in the same fields. Insects get into the crop. The older farmers want it sprayed the way everything there is sprayed, and when she will not do it they treat her as a student with a notion and leave her to it. At harvest the sprayed fields give rice that nobody will buy, because of what is in it. Hers comes out clean, and the crayfish out of her paddies grade high and go for a price the village has not seen before. She gets the growers into a cooperative after that. There are interests outside the village that had the trade to themselves, and once the cooperative is running they cut the water to the fields and hold up the trucks.