Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
Deep in the Taihang Mountains, Leyi Village, Heshun County, Shanxi, the “leopard-eating-cattle” conflict is not pronounced. Local beef cattle farming has contracted sharply during the recent price trough — only three households still keep cattle, just over seventy head, down from a peak of over two hundred.
In the wheat–maize rotation zone of southern Hebei, farmers say straw incorporation makes emergence harder, increases pests and weeds, and raises the cost of spraying and rotary tillage; even when the yield loss feels limited, they still want to burn the straw.
After Qinguan, Fuji, wheat and maize, peaches and plums are now in the wheat field again. His father, nearly seventy, has kept switching crops in Liquan, and no one can say how long he will last when the next variety boom comes.
Under the straw burning ban, Dongting Lake area farmers in Hunan are forced to incorporate straw. Oilseed rape costs 60–70 yuan extra per season, yields nearly halve, and rice stem borer and other pests worsen year on year; one large-scale grower simply abandoned over 200 mu.
A city office worker with zero experience picks plastic fragments by hand and tugs half-buried plastic twine on a 20-square-metre plot in the Beijing suburbs. The more she clears, the more appears—and her anxiety spreads from one field to pressing questions about recycling systems and consumption habits.
In Penang’s Batu Maung, durian tours take tourists seeking old-tree kampung flavours, while an exceptionally abundant harvest has also left orchard owners facing a price crash and a dispute over tree-ripened durian.
From orchards in Johor and Pahang to Mersing wholesale points and the LKE Group investment promotion meeting, on the eve of fresh Musang King durian’s entry into China, Chinese demand is reshaping picking, export, frozen processing and durian-tree investment.
Sustained heavy rain from Typhoon Maysak breached Liulan Reservoir in Hengzhou, Guangxi, flooding jasmine fields, rice paddies and fish ponds, displacing tens of thousands, and bringing the challenges of agricultural insurance and flood resilience under extreme weather into sharp focus.
A bachelor’s graduate spends a month on an ecological agriculture internship at Baicaoyuan in Guigang, Guangxi — hoeing, carrying water, weathering a violent downpour — then leaves, unable to bear the heat, admitting they can never do without air conditioning.
Five years ago, Kouzi broke raw ground from scratch and hand-built a self-sufficient one-person farm; her health indicators are now better than they were twenty years ago. This past year, she has still been fighting a lawsuit over fabrications generated by Baidu AI.
