Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
Wenzizi and Changjiaoling, graduates of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, created a satoyama on 30 mu of shallow hills in Beijing’s suburbs, coexisting with hailstorms, rainy seasons, and insects and birds. This year they have turned their farming experience into a new book, Farming in the Satoyama.
Zhen Rui’s 450-mu farm – thirteen years of cultivation – turned to silt overnight, wiping out at least 30 million yuan. He has replanted sweet corn in heated greenhouses two kilometres away, but whether the land can be farmed again and where the money will come from remain open.
Harvesters mired in mud, cobs moulded overnight, good grain at just 0.3 yuan a jin — after drought gave way to waterlogging, farmers in six Hebei and Henan counties have lost ground at every stage, while drying towers and insurance remain out of reach for most farms.
Jianning joins Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme, picking blueberries, corn, and lychees at Yinlin Farm in Conghua, Guangzhou, observing chickens, birds, black goats, and villagers at work, and sensing the living connection between food and the land.
Kouzi purified domestic wastewater in Wuren Valley using banana plants and water lilies, battled cogon grass for four years, cultivated humus from barren, compacted wasteland, and realised a self-sufficient way of living that thrives alongside the land.
SiLi in Yunnan promotes ridge-and-furrow irrigation reduced-water rice across Kunming, Honghe and Pu’er, partnering from county agricultural technology stations to Hani terrace farmers. But along the way, farming friends discuss tillering, yield and how deep to dig a well—not emission reduction.
Typhoon Huajiasha made landfall on Hailing Island, Yangjiang; Shangchuan Island recorded gusts above Force 17 – Guangdong’s strongest ever at a national-level meteorological station. Fish rafts shattered, citrus and sugarcane flattened; farmers just over ten days from the Mid-Autumn and National Day holiday face near-total wipeout.
Kouzi layers bayberries, hibiscus, aquatic plants and tuber crops in Villain Valley and pursues self-sufficiency through low-maintenance lazy farming. She also makes jam and juice from the harvest and raises a group of symbiotic ducks.
Farmer Liu Yurong in Wangjingzhuang, Shexian, Hebei, has revived the White Common Bean, nearly lost from the village, yet 171 heritage varieties in the area still face the compounded pressures of replacement by new varieties, abandoned terraced fields and extreme drought.
After her parents died in the ICU, covered in tubes, she grows beans and runs marathons in the village. She has decided to sign an advance directive — refusing CPR and a ventilator — to live sunlit and go cleanly, decisively.
