A friend’s winter visit with washing-up liquid and a stir-fry wok turned Villains’ Valley’s spring-water pool black as thick ink, ending two years of untroubled greywater purification. No argument conveys so vividly how modern household chemicals sever the mutual-nourishment cycle between people and the land, under one’s eyes.
From tending the fire by the stove to leaning on a cane to visit his own grave, the granddaughter threads her childhood with her farmer grandfather through four farming proverbs—until, in early spring 2022, he passed away at home.
Gannan navel orange output nearly doubled year on year, yet purchase prices plunged from nearly 3 yuan per jin to under 1 yuan. A cold snap forced fruit farmers into a rushed harvest with no sales channels in place, and merchants who had booked orchards broke their contracts.
Sanyuanli has become a coffee brand’s check-in exhibition venue. At the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market, meanwhile, pesticide-free strawberries, king oyster mushrooms with their caps open, and seasonal Chinese chives stand guard over the most solid trust between daily meals and the land.
Sun Shan runs an ecological farm and fermentation kitchen in Ottawa. Eight years of daily vegetable-growing and sauerkraut-making embody Sandor Katz’s vision in The Art of Fermentation: fermentation is not just food preservation, but a way to rebuild connections with microorganisms, the land and the community.
Beijing-born Liu Yang, from IT, fell for cheese while studying in France. From a small Huilongguan Farmers’ Market stall in 2009, he crafted over a dozen handmade cheeses blending French tradition with Beijing’s terroir, yet Bule Cheese Workshop faces the growth challenge of “from workshop to factory”.
At Alxa Zhiliangtian Farm, a yellow-painted shipping container coffee house brings together study tour children, fellow volunteers and kitchen helpers. Two months of small, everyday moments gave concrete warmth to the seemingly barren desert.
A former business journalist interned two months at Zhiliangtian Farm in Alxa: eight years of organic melon growing yet no stable sales channel, live-stream audiences barely hit a hundred, per-box logistics nears 20 yuan, and the farm owner himself admits the flagship product still runs at a loss.
From a Berlin hydroponic workshop to the successive closures or bankruptcies of infarm, AeroFarms and others, vertical farming’s fundamental flaws in crop variety and energy consumption are impossible to ignore. Industrial designer A Liang also charts a path for low-tech hydroponics back to communities.
Typhoon Doksuri tracked north. In Yingchengzi Village, Wuchang, Third Grandpa’s two hectares of river-bend land suffered total crop failure, leaving the whole family sixty or seventy thousand yuan in the red. The insurance payout was long overdue, and end-of-September gales caused further lodging, forcing harvest by hand.
