Food production, farmers, rural society, and agroecological practices.
Sister Yan Ping at Baicao Garden, Guigang, Guangxi, refuses herbicides on fifty mu of Wogan mandarins, making labour a practice of nurturing body and mind; Uncle Youming of the White Pants Yao in Nandan keeps a seed bank for heirloom rice, preserving his people’s rootedness in the land.
Muyunpo was founded in 2017 by the non-profit Shuguang in Xiaojin County, Sichuan’s Jiarong Tibetan region. Villagers’ groups set their own foraging and cultivation standards, with sales surpluses returned to the community at year-end—replacing the traditional purchasing system of price-suppressing traders and farmers at the market’s mercy.
Shu Shiwei, who spent a decade in the countryside, founded Green Sprout to document Taichung fruit growers’ stories of transformation. Each issue is printed in a thousand copies, most given away free; the magazine has sustained over 100 issues on reader sponsorship and unpaid contributions.
Old Li’s 70 mu of ecological farmland in H Province, guarded fifteen years, lies blanketed by mulch film fragments from a groundnut haulm plant 100 metres away. Spring ploughing slipping; two months of appeals yielded only two departments citing the same law yet deflecting responsibility onto each other.
Gannan herders call imported grain-fed meat “fake meat,” yet with local yak prices steadily falling since 2020 — a single adult yak fetches just over 6,000 yuan — many are forced to buy “fake meat” themselves.
Repórter Brasil built a traceability database combining satellite data and on-the-ground collaboration with indigenous communities, proving JBS was not “unable to trace” but actively used three-legged journeys to launder cattle from deforested ranches into the supply chain, ultimately prompting six major European chain supermarkets to boycott.
Farmer Lu Rongyan trialled chayote shoots from local heirloom varieties in Guzhai Yao Ethnic Township, Mashan, lifting income for elderly and women who stayed; cultivation hit 2,000 mu in five years. Last year’s alternating floods and droughts cut seed-fruit supply, putting seed-saving and diversified cropping on the agenda.
Rooted in Heshun, Shanxi, for a decade, Maomeng protects the North China leopard’s habitat through ecological agriculture without chemical fertilisers or pesticides. Project lead Hannah tells how a single cornfield connects leopard populations, villagers and the urban public.
Li Jidong’s 70 mu of farmland in Luanzhou, Hebei, is blanketed in shredded mulch film from a neighbouring feed-processing plant. The agriculture and environment bureaus cite the same regulations yet each insists the pollution is the other’s to tackle. Spring sowing looms, yet he still cannot sow.
Research Fellow Wang Xiaoyi (Institute of Sociology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) unpacks the contradiction between pasture-fattened yaks that “can’t fetch a fair price” and local meat that herders “can’t afford”. After marketisation “disembedded” beef and mutton from pastoral life, he asks how to “re-embed” them into the community.
