Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
At the start of 2024, farmer protests spread like wildfire across Europe, beginning in Germany. During the peak of the protests in mid-January, more than 30,000 farmers drove over 5,000 tractors from across Germany to demonstrate in Berlin. The immediate trigger was the German government’s announcement at the end of…
Long-time readers of Foodthink will certainly be familiar with the name “Grandma Kouzi”. Since 2021, this woman in her sixties has chosen to move to “Villain’s Valley” in Fujian. There, she built her own home and worked the land herself, carving a sanctuary out of the wilderness to explore a…
My grandfather was the fourth child of his family, born in 1933. He lost his mother as a child and his father as a youth, weathering years of famine. He was a farmer throughout his life, and for a time, a cotton dresser. In his later years, his dreams grew…
I. The buyers didn’t come this year On 13 December 2023, in Huichang County, Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province—the heart of the Gannan navel orange production area—Liao Hai, born in the nineties, and his mother, Aunt Zou, were preparing to start harvesting. Early that morning, his mother had gathered over a dozen…
Foodthink says In early August this year, Wuchang in Heilongjiang suffered rare torrential rains and floods, with approximately 40% of the local 2.5 million mu of farmland submerged. Two months after the disaster, livestreamers selling Wuchang rice appeared on e-commerce platforms. Set against a backdrop of lush, harvested fields, they…
I’ve lived in Eren Valley for over two years now, and the annual cost of labour and farmyard manure for the fields is quite a substantial sum. The locals I hire often can’t resist doing the sums for me, pointing out that growing things this way is far more expensive…
Industrial prosperity is a vital foundation for rural revitalisation. Perhaps inspired by Shouguang in Shandong, the centerpiece of agricultural industrial development in the rural central and western regions is often the promotion of greenhouse vegetable cultivation. Such is the case in Gong County (a pseudonym) in the central region. A…
Departing from Beijing Chaoyang Station, a high-speed rail journey of just over an hour brought us to Pingquan North Station in Chengde, Hebei, where Ren Yingying, the proprietress of Lianxiang Farm, was already waiting for us. Petite with her hair swept back, Yingying looked sharp and energetic, with a relaxed…
In Evil Valley, farmer Kouzi uses no pesticides and, though apples cannot be home-grown and pumpkins are beset by fruit flies, still learns to cherish those limited harvests.
Early autumn finally brought the first self-reliant harvest since the inception of Evil Valley. I particularly want to stress the “self-reliant” part: from transplanting the seedlings to the final harvest, I handled every step myself, taking complete charge of the whole operation single-handedly. Having moved into Evil Valley in…
