Organic production, sustainable farming methods, and agroecological practices.
Wu Longlong, a Beijing University of Agriculture graduate, returned to Ning County in Gansu, letting his black pigs roam free-range on the hills beside the Ziwuling Reserve — rooting grass, gnawing acorns, lapping up spring water, with the occasional brush with a leopard.
A Foodthink intern at Zhiliangtian Ecological Farm in Alxa confronts the risks of farming at the mercy of the weather and the frictions of communal living — yet among the plants, birds, and beasts beneath the Helan Mountains, discovers the quiet confidence to keep tending the land.
At Yulin’s Longquan Green Vegetable Shop, several owners bound in an egalitarian partnership tend local ecological produce and the daily weigh-and-close routine. Professor Xu Leiqing’s Research Group 408 at Tongji University finds such a community space — most accessible, most frequently visited — is itself a therapeutic setting.
Nearly twenty years into rural work, Lao Liu (Huang Guoliang) and his partner, Agricultural Technician Luo Lishuang, have nurtured fellow ecological farmers in Guangxi. He discusses the gap between textbook science and rural experience — and asks whether new-generation farmers’ minds have followed their bodies back to the village.
Virginia organic farmer Joel Salatin rails against USDA regulations that make on-farm slaughter and on-farm sales all “illegal”. A single Texas farm visit to slaughter chickens and rabbits illuminates the dignity and demise of the butcher’s trade beyond the production line.
Machinery cannot access small, scattered plots, and straw-incorporation subsidies flow mainly to large-scale farms and machinery operators. Yuan Yong, an agricultural technician in Jianyang, Sichuan, has spent over twenty years in no-till mulching, seeking a way for smallholders to nourish the soil and save money.
A Community-Supported Agriculture farm in Fengxian, Shanghai—20 mu of arable land held up by four farmhands in their seventies, members unwilling to share yield-loss risks, organic fertiliser still bought in—three months of farm life have reconciled ecological farming’s ideals with its realities, entry by entry.
In the Jino Mountain rainforest, Jinuo guide Saoqie forages greens, scoops fish and roasts food wrapped in banana leaves — a meal once the Jinuo people’s daily livelihood. This rainforest is no “untouched paradise”: since 24 trekking companies arrived, Jinuo lives keep shifting between rubber and tourists.
Tusheng Shiguan’s ingredients come mostly from Yang Lifen and her husband’s nearly ten-mu ecological garden in Qujing. This fourteen-year-old Kunming shop, born of group-buying among public-interest friends, weathered falling footfall and a team cut from twelve to three, true to its Slow Food philosophy: “Tend slowly, grow slowly.”
Foodthink’s Lianhe Programme sent five young people to Lüwo Farm in Jingyang, Shaanxi, where their days went far beyond planting vegetables and pulling weeds — raising seedlings, driving a tractor, working on the biscuit production line, attending biodynamic farming classes.
