Organic production, sustainable farming methods, and agroecological practices.
The cooperative’s home-brewed green plum wine was targeted by professional counterfeit hunters and its partner fined; building a processing factory far exceeds smallholders’ means. Lawyer Zhang Xueming, anthropologist Zhong Shuru and rural entrepreneur Li Jie each share their views on small-scale operators’ plight under food safety regulations.
Pollinating and bagging a 300-mu pear orchard, coordinating older workers to follow the farming calendar, hitting the markets to sell the new early-maturing pear variety – after two years growing pears, there is only one conclusion: farming is truly hard, capital on your side or not.
Held in Beijing from 18 to 20 August, the workshop recruits 25 media professionals to discuss food system transformation with scholars and practitioners, visit wholesale markets, eco-farms and waste-processing facilities, and offers post-workshop reporting grants alongside the establishment of a Pioneering Food and Agriculture Reporting Award.
A family tends ten mu of land, grows salad greens, makes ferments – with the support of Canada’s Fair Food Farms incubator, Sun Shan built Chi Garden from scratch and, through the joy of growing, left behind the helplessness and exhaustion of years in public-interest work.
Anthropology student Xiaocui interned three months at Letian Haiwan Farm in Fengxian, Shanghai. From planting tomatoes by hand to questioning why members rent plots, she saw the imagined pastoral and the real labour between city dwellers and the land.
At Sister Yan Ping’s Hundred-Herb Garden in Guigang, Guangxi, the Wogans went from heavy on every tree to utterly bare. Three months of picking fruit, planting cassava and going to market turned ecological agriculture into blisters on our hands and flea bites on our legs.
Foodthink is now recruiting for Editor, Communications and Media Operations, and two Programme Officer positions for the Lianhe Programme and Climate Change, seeking new partners in sustainable food and agriculture at its Zhichun Road office in Beijing.
Back in Shen County, Shandong, she found no vegetables tasting like childhood. Through Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme, she spent three months at Xiqing Farm, Beijing, learning from farmer Wang Xin – from identifying fully ripe strawberries to understanding ecological balance – now planning an ecological apple orchard at home.
In the 1990s, Yinlin Village, Conghua, swapped citrus for lychees; Nuomici once fetched seventy to eighty yuan a jin. Now most fruit trees lie wild. Brother Zhong and Guo Rui watch the old trees, hoping the second Yinlin Lychee Festival will bring the wild lychees back into view.
From late May to early June, Lüwo Farm in Jingyang endured nearly two weeks of continuous rain. Abro wheat and spelt wheat suffered lodging, sprouting and mould, forcing farm owner Dahei to rush an early harvest, with yield dropping by roughly 20%.
