At a free farm machinery course at Fuyang’s Agricultural Broadcasting School, only 7 of 50 trainees were women — but from tractors to combine harvesters, through sweaty palms and crossed lines, they stopped back at the starting point, steady.
Extreme weather in the north, including flooding and successive droughts, has pushed the No. 1 Document to strengthen disaster prevention. The first appearance of low-carbon agriculture moves the climate agenda from adapting to risks to emissions reduction; the key remains involving small farmers and ensuring they benefit.
Former McDonald’s shift manager Jiang Ke recounts seven months of kitchen daily life: the beeping of constant-temperature fryers, a scheduling system that slices every movement into fragments, and the repeated tug-of-war between efficiency and human feeling in an open kitchen.
In a courtyard of barely five square metres in Hangzhou – snipping kitchen scraps, sprinkling microbial powder, turning the pile bare-handed – seven bins of compost were saved over ten months, slowly nurturing black organic matter from the reddish-brown clay.
Silk quilt maker Yu Jiangang rented 14 mu of rice fields for the first time after a silkworm poisoning scare. All he could do was carry 15 mu of ecological rice from June transplanting to Beginning of Winter harvest through field patrols, field drying and four rounds of bending down to weed the paddy.
Tulan and her family, herders in Harigaobi gacha, East Ujimqin Banner, Inner Mongolia, remain committed to raising traditional Ujimqin sheep through seasonal nomadic herding. With just clear water and salt, the clean fragrance of the grassland rises from the pot.
Yiyi Farm’s universal red sour soup, made by stir-frying ginger and garlic in lard then simmering with tomatoes and celery, can boil fish, blanch beef, cook noodles, stir-fry vegetables, or become a sour soup hot pot — lifting the flavour and whetting the appetite after Spring Festival’s heavy meat and fish.
Foodthink and the Beijing Organic Farmers Market farmers present New Year’s Recipes, days two to seven. This radish simply needs the skin left on, thick-cut strips, and a dish of soy sauce set beside it — its crisp bite cuts through New Year’s rich, heavy fare.
Xiucai Doufang’s five-step, soybean paste–braised tofu is one of the dishes in the Spring Festival Recipe Collection from Foodthink and the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market. Six farm friends each serve one dish made with their own produce, from the second to the seventh day of the Lunar New Year.
Beijing Huairou Snail Farm shares its New Year recipe: slow-braise a free-range rooster with beer and spices, and in about two hours this dish comes together easily at home.