Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
Foodthink’s three-day co-learning camp in Yangqiao Village, Lianhua County, Pingxiang, Jiangxi (4–6 June) features hands-on soil, composting and liquid-fertiliser work plus returning-home case studies, helping farming friends already in or transitioning to ecological agriculture sharpen their techniques and work through yield, quality, cost, and sales.
The Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement’s Concentra platform in Belo Horizonte integrates warehousing, compliance certification, brand development and government procurement to bring dispersed smallholders’ ecological farm produce to market at scale, offering a reference for organisationally tackling smallholders’ market predicament.
Fourteen years after returning to Tongxiang, Zhejiang, silkworm farmer Yu Jiangang has taken on 15 mu (Chinese acres) of rice paddy. Under pressure from industrialised sericulture, with insurance covering only one third, he is trying to maintain rice–silkworm symbiosis.
On the hillsides of Tongchuan, the 110 mu of land Hongxia and her husband farmed under verbal agreements is being claimed back, mu by mu, by relatives who have returned home — and their 150,000 yuan in farm machinery has become a sunk cost they cannot shake.
Former consultant Chen Xi now organises members of the local clan to grow rice in the terraced fields of Yangdong Village, Qiandongnan, preserving more than twenty varieties of local paddy rice and grains and building a children’s library through purple rice charity sales.
Grandma Kouzi, in her sixties, has farmed for five years in Liancheng, Fujian, and is now fully self-sufficient in food apart from salt, working toward a complete self-sufficient system — water and electricity included — by the age of seventy.
In northern Anhui, old combines are giving way to new machines with large grain tanks and air conditioning. Bag-catchers, fertiliser-spreaders and pesticide-sprayers are losing their work one after another, yet smart agricultural machinery, at its high price, remains further from small farmers.
Chinese New Year in Wutong Village, Weiyuan County, Sichuan — under 3,000 residents, all elderly, growing vegetables, keeping hens. Rice steamed on a wood-fired stove, pea shoots pinched from ridges, hills crossed to buy beef tripe and aortic arch in the county town — five hours from rod to table.
In Lanhe Town, Nansha, black-skin sugarcane prices have fallen from 99 yuan per dan to a low of 5 yuan; clearing a mu for free means a loss of over 6,000 yuan. After “non-grain conversion” campaigns cleared out bananas, 30 years of continuous cropping leaves only one crop.
The northern girl growing sugarcane, the blogger laughed at by farmers, the tea science specialist who chats with ride-hailing drivers about rural life, the entomology PhD who calls herself a primary school student in the field — their passion for crops is real, but even they cannot say for sure whether what university teaches will take root in real farming.
