Organic production, sustainable farming methods, and agroecological practices.
Ren Yingying of Lianxiang Farm was invited by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture to the GFFA in Berlin. The position paper she co-drafted demands breaking multinational corporations’ control over seeds, land and supply chains, promoting agroecology, and safeguarding smallholder farmers’ land and policy-participation rights.
Among the more than ten ecological farms Foodthink visited, new-generation farmers bring wildly diverse professional backgrounds. Above the shared bottom line of no chemicals, from five mu of intensive cultivation to a garden-style life, every farm is the embodiment of its owner’s ideals.
In a small ranching town in Texas, Zhang Yiqing buys eggs directly from free-range backyard hens and small organic farmers, sidestepping supermarket purchase limits and price hikes. She believes decentralised local food systems are the real solution to the egg shortages intensive farming keeps causing.
Soya beans, mung beans and adzuki beans all originate from China. Following the Silk Road and the footsteps of migrants, they took root in miso, fermented bean curd and Southeast Asian kitchens, weaving together a history of the dining table that spans continents.
Zejun refused the mainstream path of life. In spring 2024, a three-month internship at Guixinyuan Farm in Huizhou, Guangdong—from weeding and feeding ducks to visiting multiple farms across the two Guangs—gradually revealed that ecological agriculture has no standard answer but a spectrum.
In 2011, Yu Jiangang took part in rural development in Zhuang villages in Longzhou, Guangxi. In 2024, he returned to Bangui hamlet to find the water buffalo all but vanished, the village school down to just 5 pupils, and the village still living to its own rhythm.
Foodthink Founding Editor Chang Tianle and Sijia, host of 100 Ways of Living, chat about ecological agriculture, supporting local farmers, and how office workers can still cook proper meals without ordering a takeaway.
Late April: the Nanning Urban Farmers’ Market’s eleventh annual gathering at Zhongtuan Village ecological farm, Hengzhou. Traditional farmers, young returnees and volunteers brought their own tents, bowls and chopsticks beneath the banyan tree, huddling through shortfalls of people and money to sustain this urban–rural community of sustainable living.
Mycorrhizal fungi are the living threads of the soil, sustaining its water and crop health. Sequencing by Agroscope confirmed that intensive agriculture has reduced their keystone species to near zero — yet restoring these underground networks is far more complex than scattering an inoculant across the soil.
Three farming friends growing vegetables in Shunyi, Beijing, and Chuxiong, Yunnan have weathered downpours battering trees and droughts cracking reservoirs — their experiences trace the link between rising vegetable prices and climate change.
