Food production, farmers, rural society, and agroecological practices.
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.
Foodthink, supported by Oxfam Hong Kong’s Beijing Office, has launched a survey soliciting practical experience and needs in climate adaptation from rural social organisations. The survey closes on 31 December 2024.
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 Ji County (pseudonym) on the North China Plain, agricultural technology extension has passed from government monopoly through market-town retail to project-based governance contracts, leaving more than 21,000 small-scale farmers with nothing but a phone call to get a drone to spray their crops.
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.
Meicuntou, with fewer than four hundred permanent residents, faces “village extinction.” Fan Hanquan offers his own land and housing free for three years to attract ecological farmers, while the village collective’s 2023 trial planting lost 70,000 yuan and the land was left fallow in 2024.
The Monsanto biography Empire of Seeds uses data to debunk the GM myth. Chinese scholars and practitioners—Tian Le, Guan Qi, Xu Zhun, Zhou Mujun among them—discuss: GM has neither reduced pesticide use nor raised yields. Can farmers and consumers re-engage with breeding and food networks?
South floods, north droughts, back-to-back typhoons – smallholder farmers bear the brunt. From stress-tolerant varieties to crop rotation and intercropping, agroecology digging deep alongside farmers is agriculture’s fundamental path through the climate crisis.
