Food production, farmers, rural society, and agroecological practices.
A post-90s couple, An Tian and San Qi, returned to Zhaixia Village, Longyan, Fujian, to grow passion fruit. Surrounding terraced fields were stained a withered yellow by the villagers’ herbicide, yet little by little they turned textbook Natural Farming into a way of getting along with this land.
A former agriculture reporter covered feed market prices and live hog shipments for two and a half years – yet stories mostly came from listed companies’ earnings, and food was always just figures. Renting a plot, chasing abscessed pork: neither closed the gap between commercial framing and the field.
At Mondeggi commons, over 450 members collectively farm 1,800 mu of land and deliberate democratically; Genuino Clandestino uses independent certification to bypass official procedures. These communities extend agroecology from a cultivation technique into collective action fighting for land and food sovereignty.
Pu’er’s coffee farmers, tossed by global prices for over a decade — felling trees for tea, then scrambling back — now see record highs. Yet the surge stems from Brazil’s cuts, extreme weather still disrupts flowering, and they are turning to value-added processing and ecological cultivation for a steadier path.
Home Action director Hu Xiaoping on how Sichuan’s project villages have responded to extreme heat — from recovering heirloom varieties to cutting growing costs — and how climate change forces them to rethink what agriculture means for their lives.
The charity Home Action promotes ecological rice cultivation across Sichuan villages — no-till mulching, no chemical fertiliser, no pesticide — so farmers who have stayed behind can grow food well amid successive droughts and heatwaves without external inputs.
Ecological farm owners in Shunyi, Changping and Baoding have endured year after year of torrential rain flooding their fields, making difficult adjustments from digging drainage trenches to switching crops, yet remain trapped by the absence of public drainage and ever-mounting costs.
Through Foodthink’s Ecological Agriculture Internship Programme, Chengzi took root for three months at Lexiangu Community Farm in Fengxian, Shanghai—growing vegetables, repairing roofs, leading goats and feeding ducks, running a market stall—and grew the courage to explore out of her uncertainty about the future.
Farm owner Zhen Rui’s two staff were swept three to four hundred metres by floodwater before escaping from their sleep in the small hours. Their 450 mu of land and nearly thirty million yuan invested over more than a decade were wiped out overnight—with no evacuation notice.
At a slaughterhouse in eastern Sichuan, over ¥100 million in investment, daily beef sales mean pre-dawn complaint barrages, lost orders over scarce back sirloin, and blood stench that won’t wash off — nineteen years of education shattered by the butchers’ flexibility.
