Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
In the strictest straw-ban season of 2025, Village A in Hunan’s Dongting Lake region patrolled for three months and liaised with collection-and-storage firms to bale and transport the straw. Still, no outlet was found; villagers seized a window when tower cameras turned away, burning over a thousand mu.
From a Beijing office to a Dong village in Qiandongnan, Chen Xi spent seven years building a timber house, growing nine varieties of rice reliably, and using the proceeds from 5,000 jin of purple rice to build the village’s first library for the children.
Dutch grower Metske went from the squatting movement and a vegetarian restaurant to a 6½-acre organic vegetable farm at Bore Place, Kent. He now sells lettuce and tomatoes at the Growing Communities market in north London, running the farm on contacts and sales channels – no subsidies.
Yang Xiuying and 70-year-old neighbour Deng Lian enter the hills before dawn, returning with hundreds of jin to peel, boil and dry all day—four to five hundred yielding under twenty. Children’s money is sporadic; social and medical costs top ten thousand yuan a year. She cannot stop.
No pesticides, no regard for yield: from their own bayberry trees to industrialised variety breeding, a southern farmer argues that store-bought fruit grows sweeter, bigger, and hardier in storage and transit, yet its nutrients decline — and every purchase votes for capital’s choices.
Xianzi, a postgraduate at China Agricultural University’s Science and Technology Backyard in Quzhou, partnered with neighbour Uncle to open an organic fertiliser plant, hoping to reconnect the broken crop-and-livestock cycle. What blocks the way: raw-material transport costs, site rent and sums grain farmers simply cannot make work.
A student at the University of Food Studies in Pollenzo recalls three unbroken hours of lectures, wild greens from the fields, cheese markets, and a glass of wine on a blizzard night — how Petrini turned food into politics, and the road Slow Food has yet to walk.
Yi Fujin of Zhejiang University begins with one cow, one mu of maize and a late spring cold snap to explain how agricultural insurance works and why smallholder farmers struggle to get their claims paid in extreme weather.
Under the 2016 straw-burning ban, village cadres hired guards and satellite-detected fires meant docked pay; ten years on, Heilongjiang farmers waited for a weather-forecasted “burning window” – simply because one pass of the deep plough for residue incorporation scrambles every plot boundary marked by ridges.
Farmers in K Village, northeastern Thailand, have self-bred more than 250 local rice varieties and sell organic rice direct via e-commerce. With their rice cooperative incubated by the village credit cooperative, they need no subsidies even as prices fell 30 per cent.
