Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
From Sichuan to Henan—topsoil stripped, pumped irrigation stations dry, transferred fields with no takers—”high-standard” conversions have become low standards in many places. Engineering thinking crashes against complex agricultural reality; who safeguards food security’s foundations remains unresolved.
In a sixteenth-century estate in western France, a Colombian brother and sister with expired visas trade room and board, waiting for residency. One month of work exchange pits the rural imagination against the reality of labour, goodwill, and the absence 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.
Field research by Feng Xiaojun’s team at China Agricultural University in a major dairy-cattle county in Shandong finds family dairy farms outperform large-scale dairy farms in farmer income, import resilience, environmental protection, and cow welfare; seven policy recommendations cover funding reform, small dairy farmer organisations, and farmer-run processing.
Smallholder farms were not the main cause of the 2008 melamine incident, and large farms hold no advantage in feed management, cattle disease prevention, or processing transparency. The roughly 0.2 g protein gap per 100 g is negligible for Chinese residents whose protein intake is already adequate.
Hua Hua and his wife Shi Tou have farmed in Gansu for nearly a decade. The original vision of ecological farming collides with the arithmetic of finances and risk — while a childhood patch of chickpeas at the field’s edge remains a four-year losing obsession on Tianzhu’s black earth.
From two bundles of Chinese leeks picked up at the big rural market, Uncle Li has spent over twenty years saving seed and selecting, coaxing a white shank longer, whiter, and better able to weather the torrential rain and floods of the Beijing suburbs.
Wang Sheng, 200,000 yuan in debt, secretly grazes in a Qinghai Lake no-grazing zone, borrowing new loans to repay old ones for seven or eight years; Tenzin Zongzhi left the pasture to deliver food but plans to herd again within months.
Zha Shiyire, a Huayao Yi girl from Shiping County, Yunnan, grew up in a deep-mountain village filled with endless farm work — from transplanting seedlings and harvesting rice to planting and curing tobacco. Her childhood ached in her ear, in her hands, and in her back.
Agricultural input dealers define “scientific farming” with rhetoric such as “foliar fertiliser nano-penetration,” pushing drone fertilising to five or six rounds a year. In 2024, with northeast maize at 1.1 yuan per jin, net profit per xiang was minimal whether farmers fertilised twice or five or six times.
