Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
Liu Juan, associate professor at China Agricultural University, uses fieldwork in Chongqing, Hebei and elsewhere to show how droughts, windstorms and other shocks hit smallholder farmers facing labour outflow and low grain returns — arguing that climate adaptation must first address these fundamental questions in the agrarian transition.
Rooted in Guangxi rural reconstruction for nearly 20 years, Lao Liu (Huang Guoliang) draws on years beside fellow ecological farmers to discuss bridging two knowledge systems, whether new-generation farmers have returned in heart as well as body, and how training can go beyond imitation to observing and thinking.
Since farming in Virginia in the 1970s, Salatin has consistently pointed out that in the United States, slaughtering one’s own livestock on-site, selling the meat to neighbours, and even opening a farm to visitors are all illegal.
Under the “no-burning” ban, smallholders on small plots, with no machinery and subsidies out of reach, still simply set the straw alight. Yet over twenty years of Sichuan technician Yuan Yong’s no-till mulching work, echoed by fieldwork nationwide, point to a clear conclusion: straw incorporation must fit smallholders’ own ledgers.
In 2019, the fall armyworm swept into Ji County on the North China Plain, leaving farmers to queue anxiously for drone spraying. Once technology extension passed from farmers’ own hands to full takeover by agricultural technology companies, smallholders gradually lost their field skills and grip on production.
Sao Qie, a Jino guide in Xishuangbanna, leads a group through Jino Mountain to catch fish, eat wrapped dishes and share a Jino song, while ecotourism reshapes village life.
From their own vegetable plots in Qujing to a table on a steep Kunming slope, Tusheng Shiguan is fourteen years in; footfall has dropped from a full mezzanine to three staff, but its Slow Food way — no pesticides, no MSG — has not changed.
I. An Unexpected Village Party Secretary “Ecological farming?” Fan Hanquan, who had his back to us, suddenly turned around. “I want to try it.” I was slightly surprised. It was 23 February 2022. I remember it so clearly because since I entered E-Ren Valley in 2021, he has been the…
Editor’s Note I first met Jiang Ziqi at a book fair in Hangzhou in 2023, where she invited the Farmer Seed Network to give a talk on seed saving. At the time, I learned that she and some of her partners in Hangzhou cultivated their own small vegetable gardens and…
Editor’s Note I first met Jiang Ziqi at a book fair in Hangzhou in 2023. She had invited the Farmer Seed Network to give a talk on seed saving during the event; at the time, I knew that she and several of her partners in Hangzhou tended their own small…
