313 Farm

When you hear the word “farm,” do you think of big fields of wheat? Or herds of cows and sheep? Or maybe a market garden style vegetable patch? Maurizio Rossi is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of H-FARM, a fascinating “incubator” located just outside Venice, which uses something of the idea and imagery of a “farm” to try to teach and promote entrepreneurism in young people, allowing seeds of new ideas and new technologies to be planted and nurtured. ShaoLan teaches the word for “farm” in Chinese and explains the meaning behind the characters, which Maurizio feels actually represents what they are doing at H-FARM in an extremely accurate way.

The way to say “farm” in Chinese is 農莊/农庄. The first character means “agriculture” and the second character means “village”, where an agricultural village is a kind of small-scale local farm. A second way to describe a farm is 農場/农场, which uses the same first character, followed by the character for “field” and can represent a bigger, more industrial kind of farm.