Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
In Youmi Village, north-west Yunnan, left-behind women, including Yuting and Ga Tu, are trialling water-saving upland rice. The NGO Farmers’ Seed Network, through Jinghong-based restaurant owner Haimei, found an old Jino variety, Sickler Rice, from Xishuangbanna, leaving a spark for staple food and rice-growing culture.
At a free farm machinery course at Fuyang’s Agricultural Broadcasting School, only 7 of 50 trainees were women — but from tractors to combine harvesters, through sweaty palms and crossed lines, they stopped back at the starting point, steady.
Silk quilt maker Yu Jiangang rented 14 mu of rice fields for the first time after a silkworm poisoning scare. All he could do was carry 15 mu of ecological rice from June transplanting to Beginning of Winter harvest through field patrols, field drying and four rounds of bending down to weed the paddy.
Yiyi Farm’s universal red sour soup, made by stir-frying ginger and garlic in lard then simmering with tomatoes and celery, can boil fish, blanch beef, cook noodles, stir-fry vegetables, or become a sour soup hot pot — lifting the flavour and whetting the appetite after Spring Festival’s heavy meat and fish.
Xiucai Doufang’s five-step, soybean paste–braised tofu is one of the dishes in the Spring Festival Recipe Collection from Foodthink and the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market. Six farm friends each serve one dish made with their own produce, from the second to the seventh day of the Lunar New Year.
Shaanxi’s drought robs the land of its fruit, torrential rain over North China washes out rice paddies, delivery riders sprint to the algorithm, Brazilian ‘fake meat’ lands on Qinghai–Tibet herders’ tables – in 2025, climate, capital and trade all tighten, squeezing smallholders into the narrowest corner.
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, a China Agricultural University graduate with 20 years in rural construction, grew a full season of rice in Qingshan Village, Hangzhou—opening every cost from raising seedlings to milling and packaging, asking why “without chemical fertilisers or pesticides” is impossible in real farm division of labour.
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.
