Organic production, sustainable farming methods, and agroecological practices.
From Beijing to Dali, Xi’an and Shanghai, across more than a dozen ecological farms: barnyard grass sways free in the rice, weeds guard the soft topsoil beneath the roses, yet Canadian goldenrod still demands a blade — in the same fields, why is the bond between people and grass so different?
Wenzizi and Changjiaoling, graduates of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, created a satoyama on 30 mu of shallow hills in Beijing’s suburbs, coexisting with hailstorms, rainy seasons, and insects and birds. This year they have turned their farming experience into a new book, Farming in the Satoyama.
Jianning joins Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme, picking blueberries, corn, and lychees at Yinlin Farm in Conghua, Guangzhou, observing chickens, birds, black goats, and villagers at work, and sensing the living connection between food and the land.
Kouzi purified domestic wastewater in Wuren Valley using banana plants and water lilies, battled cogon grass for four years, cultivated humus from barren, compacted wasteland, and realised a self-sufficient way of living that thrives alongside the land.
SiLi in Yunnan promotes ridge-and-furrow irrigation reduced-water rice across Kunming, Honghe and Pu’er, partnering from county agricultural technology stations to Hani terrace farmers. But along the way, farming friends discuss tillering, yield and how deep to dig a well—not emission reduction.
Coaches day after day follow the same route along the village’s carefully arranged roads, telling eco stories to inspection groups and tourists; the scorched-black field ridges charred by herbicide beneath the rice paddies are selectively hidden in the display.
Over three months at Xiqing Farm in Zhangziying Town, Daxing, Beijing, Tianyi saw how weeds retain moisture, ants herd aphids, and a water-starved sweet pepper turns to flowering and seeding — the living logic of land and crops behind repetitive labour.
Kouzi layers bayberries, hibiscus, aquatic plants and tuber crops in Villain Valley and pursues self-sufficiency through low-maintenance lazy farming. She also makes jam and juice from the harvest and raises a group of symbiotic ducks.
Farmer Liu Yurong in Wangjingzhuang, Shexian, Hebei, has revived the White Common Bean, nearly lost from the village, yet 171 heritage varieties in the area still face the compounded pressures of replacement by new varieties, abandoned terraced fields and extreme drought.
Over 16 years, Louis turned a banana plantation on the edge of the Atlantic Forest in Paraná into a Syntropic Agroforestry system. Zhang Zhiwei follows him into the woodland — cutting leaves, felling pseudostems, thinning suckers — and now returns to Yunnan to root this knowledge underfoot.
