Analysis of agricultural product prices, supply chains, corporate behavior, and industry trends.
The Sugar Association bankrolled Harvard professors to publish papers claiming sugar was unrelated to heart disease, and the Seven Countries Study cherry-picked data from just 7 of 22 sampled countries. The half-century “low-fat” craze that followed left heart disease undiminished while obesity and diabetes spread.
A strike by over 40,000 riders failed to paralyse New Year’s deliveries, and Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal even mocked the riders on X. Indian riders working roughly 15 hours a day with no contracts are being organised by newly formed worker associations, fighting for safety and income protections.
Canned condensed milk and milk powder made perishable milk portable and shelf-stable; companies such as Borden and Nestlé sold them to colonies, mines and urban households, while ice cream and chocolate pushed demand even higher.
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.
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.
Mixed-loading in tankers is only the surface issue. Supermarket vegetable oil – n-hexane-extracted, refined through two rounds of high heat – still harbours solvent residue, trans fat and excess ω-6. Low-temperature cooking and eating nuts plain are a stupid way around them.
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.
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.
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.
On Thanksgiving 1953, Swanson & Sons, needing to clear surplus turkeys, packed meat, vegetables and sauce into compartmented aluminium trays and sold them frozen; since then, retort pouches and modified atmosphere packaging have in turn emerged, continually rewriting food’s journey.
