Organic production, sustainable farming methods, and agroecological practices.
In a courtyard of barely five square metres in Hangzhou – snipping kitchen scraps, sprinkling microbial powder, turning the pile bare-handed – seven bins of compost were saved over ten months, slowly nurturing black organic matter from the reddish-brown clay.
Silk quilt maker Yu Jiangang rented 14 mu of rice fields for the first time after a silkworm poisoning scare. All he could do was carry 15 mu of ecological rice from June transplanting to Beginning of Winter harvest through field patrols, field drying and four rounds of bending down to weed the paddy.
Tulan and her family, herders in Harigaobi gacha, East Ujimqin Banner, Inner Mongolia, remain committed to raising traditional Ujimqin sheep through seasonal nomadic herding. With just clear water and salt, the clean fragrance of the grassland rises from the pot.
Shaanxi’s drought robs the land of its fruit, torrential rain over North China washes out rice paddies, delivery riders sprint to the algorithm, Brazilian ‘fake meat’ lands on Qinghai–Tibet herders’ tables – in 2025, climate, capital and trade all tighten, squeezing smallholders into the narrowest corner.
The “plantationocene” logic clears land through large-scale monoculture and severs people from ecology. From colonial tea estates to the Green Revolution, rural communities and ecosystems bear the cost. The Qimin Yaoshu’s mixed cropping and the decentralised Ming–Qing tea industry point to an agriculture of care, not control.
On 7 February, Foodthink’s editorial team takes over the Jishi grocery shop in Sanyuanqiao for 12 hours — with a year-end review, a sharing session on selling produce as a method, a Chinese New Year provisions livestream, and a documentary-and-lamb-broth dinner, in person and online.
Chen Jingjing, a China Agricultural University graduate with 20 years in rural construction, grew a full season of rice in Qingshan Village, Hangzhou—opening every cost from raising seedlings to milling and packaging, asking why “without chemical fertilisers or pesticides” is impossible in real farm division of labour.
In a sixteenth-century estate in western France, a Colombian brother and sister with expired visas trade room and board, waiting for residency. One month of work exchange pits the rural imagination against the reality of labour, goodwill, and the absence of rights protections.
Nearly a hundred participants assembled article titles and Cantonese dishes into eight climate science fiction novellas; a documentary probes imported meat’s impact on the pastoral regions around Qinghai Lake; a forum examines extreme weather’s cascading changes to agriculture and the dining table.
Hua Hua and his wife Shi Tou have farmed in Gansu for nearly a decade. The original vision of ecological farming collides with the arithmetic of finances and risk — while a childhood patch of chickpeas at the field’s edge remains a four-year losing obsession on Tianzhu’s black earth.
