Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
The Ujimqin sheep from Dulan’s herder family in Harigaobi, East Ujimqin Banner, graze nomadically through all four seasons. Boiled with only water and salt until soft and yielding, they are lightly gamy, fresh and tender — the true flavour of the grassland.
Yiyi Farm stir-fries ginger and garlic in lard until fragrant, then adds tomato, celery and other ingredients to simmer a versatile red sour soup. It can be used to cook fish, blanch beef, make noodles, stir-fry vegetables, or make a sour soup hotpot, refreshing the palate after Spring Festival’s hearty fish and meat.
Food and farming media outlet Foodthink’s 2025 hot topics cover climate disasters, the food-delivery wars, imported meat, smallholders’ plight, returning home to farm, ecological agriculture and the pre-prepared food controversy.
Kouzi’s sixth winter in rural Fujian puts the rocket stove and the big kang, the polytunnel and the old granary, radish, ginger and jujube soup, and dried pumpkin to work, turning the damp cold into warm, easy days.
Farmer Kou Yanding has sued for defamation after Baidu AI generated a fake “judgment” saying he had been sentenced for extortion. The Beijing Internet Court has heard the case, making it the first AI defamation case in China with documented records.
Chen Jingjing, with 20 years of rural construction experience, worked in the fields for the first time in Qingshan Village, Hangzhou. By avoiding herbicides and relying on sun drying, he incurred extra labour costs and calculated that the cost of a catty of rice exceeded 30 yuan. The accounts uncover how land rent, grain subsidy and division of labour are changing ecological rice cultivation.
Farmers, construction contractors and researchers in villages in the southwest, northwest and central regions recount how some high-standard farmland has been abandoned because of water shortages, levelling and soil damage; they also discuss subsidies, acceptance inspection and squeezed profit margins, asking how food security can truly be safeguarded.
In a sixteenth-century manor in western France, a Colombian brother and sister with expired visas were working in exchange for board and lodging and waiting for residency; a month of work exchange made the fantasy of rural life collide with the reality of labour, kindness, and a lack of rights protections.
In Èrén Gǔ, Kouzi served roasted pumpkin, maize and homemade tempeh at the table, using an air fryer and a high-speed blender to make seasonal harvests into everyday staple foods.
After surveying a major dairy cow farming county in Shandong, Feng Xiaojun’s team at China Agricultural University believes smallholder family dairy farms should be supported as a priority, and that the disadvantaged position of small dairy farmers can be changed by regulating dairy companies’ purchasing and supporting dairy farmers to jointly establish processing operations.
