Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
In Jianyang, Ya’an and other places in Sichuan, farmers including Yang Xiuyou and non-profit organisation Home Action use no-till cover, heirloom varieties and experience in storing grain to cope with harvest risk in persistent drought, while also sustaining village life for the left-behind elderly.
Ecological farmers in Beijing and Hebei have reshaped fields, repaired drainage channels and adjusted crops after consecutive downpours, trying to limit losses while facing added pressure from labour, facilities and public drainage.
Zhen Rui, owner of Sohu Farm, Beizhuang town, Miyun, had 450 mu of land washed away, and his investment of nearly 30 million was wiped out overnight. Two colleagues narrowly escaped death, and a weakness in early warning for extreme rainfall was fully exposed.
A couple in Lufeng, Guangdong, returned to their orchard and sent lychees elsewhere. Shipping and packaging ended up taking nearly a third of their income, and they had to pick and pack while it was cool to keep the fruit from turning black.
61-year-old farmer Sun Wenxiang, with his wife and father, maintains ecological farming in Qilong Village, Hongya County, keeping old rice varieties such as Red-beak Glutinous Rice, relying on black pigs, biogas slurry and daily weeding, while questioning whether old varieties will reach the next generation.
Grandma Kouzi has spent four years reclaiming land in Villain’s Valley, Fujian, turning a muddy mountain gully behind the house into a slope where gardenias, wild ginger and coreopsis grow, and, amid repeated failures, has also acknowledged the boundaries of her capability.
In heavy rain after the drought, rural residents in Sanjiang, Liuzhou; Lihu, Nandan; and Du’an, Hechi, faced water and power outages, washed-out roads or damaged crops. A mother and daughter in Lihu also moved Baiku Yao ceremonial dress to the fourth floor.
In a dialogue at the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market, Kang Li, an Yi woman from Chuxiong, Yunnan, and Jin Peng, a Greater Khingan Mountains forager, describe returning to the mountains to pick mushrooms and selling wild mountain produce, discussing mountain village labour, climate change and pricing logic.
Summer arrives, and with it, another season for watermelon. Watermelons are inseparable from summer, just as the farmers behind the fruit evolve alongside their crop. Wherever there is land, you will find the watermelon farmers of Taizhou. Their history of enterprise dates back to the 1980s, forming another chapter in…
I. Flowers in Early Bloom On 3 May, in Jinqu Town, Mei County, Shaanxi, Xu Yuanlin spotted the messenger flower in his vineyard first thing in the morning. He was stunned. The so-called messenger flower is the first blossom of the season; like a herald, it warns farmers to begin…
