Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
Editor’s Note In the previous instalment of this column, Sister Yiguo showed us how she uses her ‘Little Dining Table’ in the city to provide her friends with wholesome, delicious meals. Even more dedicated than her is the producer of the rice served at that table—Chen Ying, the owner of…
I. Devastating Yield Loss: The ‘Super Lean Year’ for Lychees Conghua District in Guangzhou is one of the primary lychee-producing regions in Guangdong. July is the peak harvest season, but some sights that were once commonplace are vanishing. Where branches used to bow under the weight of fruit, there are…
Foodthink Says The rainfall in the south this year has been distressing; we have not only seen the devastation in the news but have also received a steady stream of bad news from our farming friends about reduced yields. Our old friend Kouzi, based in Fujian, has seen almost total…
Editor’s Note In the Yulin community of Chengdu, a vegetable “blind box” from farmer-friend Hu Xuemei brought a little “shock” and an unexpected change to Xia Lili, the cook of the Little Dining Table. This is the fourth instalment of “Master One-Pot’s Little Dining Table”, which will discuss Xia Lili’s…
I once wrote ‘How Much Land Does a Man Need?’ and, in practice, I found that a modest plot of land is quite enough to sustain all my life’s needs. So, for someone like me living on such a plot, how much living space is actually necessary? How large should…
I. Setting Out with Questions In late March, I began a three-month internship at Guixinyuan Farm. Partly, it was to see if I was cut out for a life of agricultural labour; partly, I was searching for an ideal model of farming: what should be the relationship between agriculture and…
I. My Story with Fireflies As a Northerner, I had never seen a firefly before the age of fifty; my limited knowledge was confined to the idiom “studying by the light of reflected snow and fireflies in a bag”. That was until I found myself immersed in a sea of…
On 12 April, a week after the Grain Rain solar term, eastern Sichuan had seen several consecutive rainfalls. This provided relief from the drought that had persisted from the Lunar New Year into March, and the rice seedlings in the fields were nearing the time for transplanting. That afternoon, Yuan…
Li Pengyue, a former IT professional now running an ecological orchard in Weihai, Shandong, compares crop losses from birds and rabbits to a trapped snow leopard and nine dead sheep, and the real question is who pays when wildlife damages crops and livestock.
I was born in a small tea-growing village in Hunan. Growing up amidst the tea gardens and mountain forests gave me a particular interest in the tea industry. When I was a child, tea production in the village lacked a formal system; every household ran it as a side hustle,…
