Organic production, sustainable farming methods, and agroecological practices.
Foodthink’s three-day co-learning camp in Yangqiao Village, Lianhua County, Pingxiang, Jiangxi (4–6 June) features hands-on soil, composting and liquid-fertiliser work plus returning-home case studies, helping farming friends already in or transitioning to ecological agriculture sharpen their techniques and work through yield, quality, cost, and sales.
The Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement’s Concentra platform in Belo Horizonte integrates warehousing, compliance certification, brand development and government procurement to bring dispersed smallholders’ ecological farm produce to market at scale, offering a reference for organisationally tackling smallholders’ market predicament.
March oilseed rape season: after drones sprayed pesticides, bee colonies in many areas were “wiped out” – beekeepers received no notice. Agricultural ecology practitioner Li Chunliang and pollination conservation scholar Zou Yi on spraying vs beekeeping: who files, who gives way, who pays for ¥700 billion of pollination services.
Harvard professor Chensheng Lu, apiarist Kenneth Wallholl and toxicologist Richard Callahan confirmed through a fifteen-hive field experiment: sustained low-dose ingestion of neonicotinoid insecticides from seed coating damages bees’ mitochondria, causing entire colonies to leave their hives with no corpse in sight.
Fourteen years after returning to Tongxiang, Zhejiang, silkworm farmer Yu Jiangang has taken on 15 mu (Chinese acres) of rice paddy. Under pressure from industrialised sericulture, with insurance covering only one third, he is trying to maintain rice–silkworm symbiosis.
Former consultant Chen Xi now organises members of the local clan to grow rice in the terraced fields of Yangdong Village, Qiandongnan, preserving more than twenty varieties of local paddy rice and grains and building a children’s library through purple rice charity sales.
Grandma Kouzi, in her sixties, has farmed for five years in Liancheng, Fujian, and is now fully self-sufficient in food apart from salt, working toward a complete self-sufficient system — water and electricity included — by the age of seventy.
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 Youmi Village, north-west Yunnan, left-behind women, including Yuting and Ga Tu, are trialling water-saving upland rice. The NGO Farmers’ Seed Network, through Jinghong-based restaurant owner Haimei, found an old Jino variety, Sickler Rice, from Xishuangbanna, leaving a spark for staple food and rice-growing culture.
Nearly 10,000 EU farmers hurled potatoes at the EU headquarters building in Brussels to protest the Mercosur free trade agreement. Ukraine’s grain price collapse, Brazil’s deforestation for cattle, and China’s smallholder green transition dilemma point to one question: who bears the cost of structural transformation?
