Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
A-Wei, founder of Qing Ya’er, reflects on the three circumstances behind its founding, how unpaid submissions from food and agriculture practitioners and reader sponsorships keep it financially balanced, and its inspiration for food and agriculture practices across the Taiwan Strait.
H Province farmer Old Li’s 70 mu of farmland lies under mulch film fragments blown from a neighbouring peanut haulm processing plant. The Ecology and Environment and Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureaus deflect jurisdiction onto each other; over two months on, pollution persists and accountability grows ever harder.
I. Airborne Plastic Blight With spring ploughing imminent, Li Jidong, a farmer from Nuomizhuang Village in Luanzhou, Hebei, found himself unable to plough his land. Across his 70 mu of farmland, fragmented pieces of plastic mulch of various sizes, blown in from a nearby farm, were scattered everywhere. They covered…
This position paper, drafted at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture in Berlin, calls for ending transnational corporations’ monopoly over seeds and land, rebuilding food production through agroecology, and incorporating food sovereignty into the international human rights framework.
During a Foodthink internship, an anthropology postgraduate visits over a dozen ecological farms: five mu of hand-tended polytunnels, eighty mu of mechanised open fields, food-forest-style Guiling and Baicaoyuan — seeing new farmers, beyond chemical fertilisers and pesticides, forge cultivation and dwelling with weed-like freedom.
Qiaoyun’s family moved from the Nanling Yao Mountains to the plains beside Shaoguan Danxia Airport in the 1990s. The mountain-and-forest intuition sharpened by generations of shifting cultivation lets them find Summer Solstice Mushrooms earlier than others in the mushroom-foraging army.
I. Returning to 2011 The reserve’s shuttle stopped by the side of a narrow concrete road, flanked by karst limestone mountains that seemed strangely familiar. We passed through a sugarcane grove; in fact, countless bare stone peaks in the area are surrounded by sugarcane. Unlike the black-purple skin of fruit…
Foodthink Says How many people can commit to a single endeavour for a decade? The Nanning Urban Farmers’ Market is one such example. Since its inception in 2013, it has now entered its eleventh year. Held every two months, each market attracts dozens of vendors selling ecological produce from Guangxi—the…
Beijing University of Agriculture graduate Wu Longlong, back in Gansu’s Ning County since 2015, free-ranges black pigs beside Ziwuling Reserve at half a jin maize each daily. This spring, the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market headed up to see mountain-roaming pigs sharing a ridge with the North China leopard.
In the desert fields beneath the Helan Mountains, one rainstorm cracks the honeydew melons, and a dozen or so shared meals and quarters test an introvert’s endurance. Yet the silver glow of Russian olive trees and the Milky Way overhead give a reason to stay and farm.
