At a farmers’ market in a small American Midwest town, a pig and cattle farmer running eight hundred mu of land single-handedly still sells meat, fixes machines and climbs trees on a still-healing hip – because farm income cannot keep a family afloat.
“One-size-fits-all” farm closures in no-farming zones and straw-burning bans leaving villagers detained: Jin Shuqin, Research Center for Rural Economy, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, argues that “blocking without channeling” strays from rural revitalisation’s thriving industries and livable ecology — green and development are one.
In Beijing, Professor Steffanie Scott of the University of Waterloo and CSA farmer Theresa Schumilas introduced Canada’s organisational network, from national farming associations to community supported agriculture, and discussed its implications for smallholder and consumer alliances in China.
Seventeen families, including an Australian and an Italian household, run a vegetable sprint, throw potatoes, pull weeds and identify ten wild plants on Time Farm’s duck-rice paddy in Jiangning District, Nanjing.
Tang Liang of Jintang County, Chengdu, returned home with 30,000 yuan in starting capital to farm for six years, tending 30 mu of ecologically farmed land with nine family members, earning roughly 2,000 yuan a month each and reuniting a family scattered for over a decade.
Vertical farm lighting accounts for 70 per cent of operating costs, and lab-grown meat is still backed by big capital — Bill Gates, Cargill and others. Changing the food system takes more than technology: it needs collective action in farmers’ markets, CSA and urban community gardens.
Argentine journalist Caparrós travels to seven countries, turning 800 million people’s statistics into lived reality — beans boiling in a thatched hut, fried chicken rummaged from a rubbish mountain — and traces the root cause to the financialization of food and power, not insufficient production.
From Laughingstock to Eye of the Storm: A Small Machine Wreaks Havoc on California’s Tomato Industry
Deployed as the Bracero Programme ended, the UC Davis harvester saw 4,428 of California’s 5,000 tomato farms collapse, displaced 32,000 workers, and replaced hand-picked fruit with a bland, machine-friendly variety still in most American ketchup.
Sun Shan, now based in Ottawa, expands the concept into six rules for grocery shopping—choose simple fresh foods, reduce packaging, buy in bulk, prioritise fresh plant foods, and shop at farmers’ markets more often—adding that the same principles apply just as well in China’s large chain supermarkets.
At the Fifth National Farmers’ Seed Network Annual Conference, smallholders from Yunnan, Guangxi, Hebei, Jiangsu and beyond exchanged on seed selection and cross-breeding, linked Community Seed Banks to farmers’ markets, and wove old varieties, ethnic food, and festival rites back into the fields.