Organic production, sustainable farming methods, and agroecological practices.
Foodthink will run a three-day co-learning camp in Yangqiao Village, Lianhua County, Pingxiang, Jiangxi from 4 to 6 June, focused on hands-on practice in soil, compost and liquid fertiliser and return-to-farming case studies, helping farmers already working in or looking to move into ecological agriculture improve their techniques and make sense of yield, quality, cost and sales channels.
In Belo Horizonte, the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement has built a sales platform that centralises warehousing, order handling, certification and delivery, enabling dispersed smallholder produce to reach restaurants, shops and government food-procurement channels.
With insurance covering only a third and industrialized sericulture squeezing him, Yu Jiangang, a sericulture farmer in Tongxiang, Zhejiang Province, who has been back in his hometown for 14 years, has leased 15 mu of paddy fields to try to maintain rice-silkworm symbiosis.
Former consultant Chen Xi now organises clan members in Yangdong Village, Qiandongnan, to grow rice on terraced fields, preserving over 20 local varieties of rice and coarse grains, and has built a children’s library through charity sales of purple rice.
Inspired by solo fruit farmer Li Baolian in Lishan, Taiwan, sixty-something Grandma Kouzi runs a one-person farm in Evil Man Valley. By year five, she is self-sufficient except salt and has calculated building and self-sufficient living costs of 100,000-plus to 500,000 yuan under different conditions.
Zuo Zhi, executive director of the Yunnan Sili Centre for Ecological Alternative Technologies, teaches farmers out in the fields to use fewer pesticides and grow heritage rice varieties, building trust by ‘speaking plainly’ while promoting 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.
As the EU–Mercosur free trade agreement was about to be signed, EU farmers in Brussels hurled potatoes at the EU headquarters building, asking who should bear the costs of the grain-price shock and green transition; Chinese smallholder farmers also face a similar cost-sharing question.
In the small courtyard of the studio in Hangzhou, Jiang Ziqi turns kitchen waste, coffee grounds, tissues and other organic residues into compost, then mixes it into the poor red-brown clay and plants sponge gourds, chillies and peas.
In the Jiangnan village of Zhenghebang, the Yu Jiangang family, who had made silk quilts for many years, had once wanted to leave. In 2024, after their Guihua silkworms were poisoned, they converted 14 mu of paddy fields beside the mulberry trees to ecological farming; along with their own 1 mu, they created a 15-mu ecological paddy field.
