At Xiaoxiang Supermarket, pickers climb shelves, enter cold rooms, and scan items one by one under algorithmic timing and piece-rate pay. Mis-picked and missed items are an unavoidable structural problem of “speedism”—not individual negligence.
Sustainable food and agriculture content platform Foodthink resumes at Grain Rain, documenting smallholders’ livelihoods, field workers, climate change, biodiversity and policy changes. It clarifies this year’s focus: the International Year of Women in Agriculture, the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists and climate resilience action.
In northern Anhui, old combines are giving way to new machines with large grain tanks and air conditioning. Bag-catchers, fertiliser-spreaders and pesticide-sprayers are losing their work one after another, yet smart agricultural machinery, at its high price, remains further from small farmers.
Yijing Market, Wuzhou, Guangxi: Juzi’s grandmother opened the shop with the market in 1995; Juzi’s mother now opens at dawn, portions spices late at night and wins repeat trade by remembering regulars’ tastes, as Wuzhou’s wet markets decline and the small shop awaits its fate.
Farmer Seed Network core member Guan Qi died unexpectedly on a March business trip to Qinghai. Foodthink colleagues and partners write of a friend who bridged land and academia on the seed-conservation front line – and always dragged everyone out to try new restaurants and craft beer.
Four Foodthink articles on delivery riders, corn mould in North China, rural heating in Hebei, and high-standard farmland — none a traditionally “sensitive” topic — were successively taken down from the platform, and the space for public discussion shrank with each recurrence.
Chinese New Year in Wutong Village, Weiyuan County, Sichuan — under 3,000 residents, all elderly, growing vegetables, keeping hens. Rice steamed on a wood-fired stove, pea shoots pinched from ridges, hills crossed to buy beef tripe and aortic arch in the county town — five hours from rod to table.
Zuo Zhi, Executive Director of the Yunnan Sili Ecological Substitution Technology Center, works in the fields teaching farmers to use fewer pesticides and grow landrace rice, building trust by “speaking in plain terms” and advancing climate-friendly rice.
In Lanhe Town, Nansha, black-skin sugarcane prices have fallen from 99 yuan per dan to a low of 5 yuan; clearing a mu for free means a loss of over 6,000 yuan. After “non-grain conversion” campaigns cleared out bananas, 30 years of continuous cropping leaves only one crop.
The old village in Heilongjiang holds only seven or eight households; my mother wept before the dish shelf and soured-cabbage crock in the collapsed-back-wall courtyard. Those left in Beijing try—with a crock, a bag of salt, a few cabbages—to re-stitch days bound to land and neighbours.