The environmental and soil impacts of agricultural inputs and pollution issues.
Under the straw burning ban, Dongting Lake area farmers in Hunan are forced to incorporate straw. Oilseed rape costs 60–70 yuan extra per season, yields nearly halve, and rice stem borer and other pests worsen year on year; one large-scale grower simply abandoned over 200 mu.
From motorways to fertilised farmland, it is a designed technological system—not personal choice—that locks modern life into oil. This system and war are two sides of the same coin, yet need not remain inseparable.
On 31 May, Foodthink invites Professor Lü Chensheng, author of The Vanishing Bees, to DT51 RDV Bookshop in Beijing to discuss the ecological and health risks of neonicotinoid insecticides, from seed to table.
March oilseed rape season: after drones sprayed pesticides, bee colonies in many areas were “wiped out” – beekeepers received no notice. Agricultural ecology practitioner Li Chunliang and pollination conservation scholar Zou Yi on spraying vs beekeeping: who files, who gives way, who pays for ¥700 billion of pollination services.
Harvard professor Chensheng Lu, apiarist Kenneth Wallholl and toxicologist Richard Callahan confirmed through a fifteen-hive field experiment: sustained low-dose ingestion of neonicotinoid insecticides from seed coating damages bees’ mitochondria, causing entire colonies to leave their hives with no corpse in sight.
Fourteen years after returning to Tongxiang, Zhejiang, silkworm farmer Yu Jiangang has taken on 15 mu (Chinese acres) of rice paddy. Under pressure from industrialised sericulture, with insurance covering only one third, he is trying to maintain rice–silkworm symbiosis.
Zuo Zhi, Executive Director of the Yunnan Sili Ecological Substitution Technology Center, works in the fields teaching farmers to use fewer pesticides and grow landrace rice, building trust by “speaking in plain terms” and advancing climate-friendly rice.
The “plantationocene” logic clears land through large-scale monoculture and severs people from ecology. From colonial tea estates to the Green Revolution, rural communities and ecosystems bear the cost. The Qimin Yaoshu’s mixed cropping and the decentralised Ming–Qing tea industry point to an agriculture of care, not control.
IPES-FOOD’s report Fuel to Fork dissects how the food system consumes at least 15% of the world’s fossil fuels—from nitrogen fertiliser in the fields and ultra-processed foods and plastic in factories, to supermarket refrigerated cabinets and household stoves—and offers eight decoupling recommendations.
From the rice fields of the Northeast to Hainan’s orchards, cross-region drone pilot Brother Yang, drone-buying farmer Zhao Mingliang, and others are facing falling spray unit prices, pesticide damage disputes and occupational illness risks for which compensation is hard to claim.
