Food production, farmers, rural society, and agroecological practices.
Foodthink Says In 1924, Fei Dasheng, along with teachers and students from the Jiangsu Provincial Women’s Sericulture School, travelled to Kaixiangong Village in Wujiang County to establish the Silk Improvement Society, nearly a hundred years ago. Their aim was to reverse the decline of the sericulture industry and the widespread…
You will almost certainly recognise cockleburs: oval fruits tipped with hook-like spines that cling to clothing and animals once ripe. A quick walk through the fields can often leave your trousers covered in them. While the native cocklebur has been established in China for centuries, an invasive relative, the Italian…
Three months at Happiness Fruit Baicaoyuan have blurred the passage of time. All I truly recall is the overcast sky on my arrival, and the cloudless blue as I departed. I. Discovering Baicaoyuan: A New “Peach Blossom Spring” Happiness Fruit Baicaoyuan is a farm situated in Guigang, Guangxi, not far…
Foodthink is a community dedicated to knowledge, information and writing on sustainable food and agriculture, co-founded and managed by a group of long-standing practitioners and researchers in the field. Since our launch in August 2017, we have connected with nearly 200 outstanding researchers and practitioners across China and internationally. Together,…
In 2021, after a decade of drifting in Beijing, I returned to my hometown of Shenxian County in Shandong due to my mental and physical health. I stayed there for nearly a year. Shenxian is often called “China’s premier vegetable county”, with fruit and vegetable cultivation covering more than a…
In late June, while travelling by car to Jiangbutasi village in eastern Altay, Xinjiang, we kept coming across Kazakh herders on horseback driving their livestock to summer pastures. Vehicles frequently had to pull over to let the herds pass. This is now the migration season for herders. Herders in the…
Last year, Foodthink published an article 《Taking an Internet Celebrity Home to Sell Navel Oranges: Only Then Did We Realise How Tough Life Is for Fruit Farmers》. In it, Fengche, who works in Guangzhou, shares her story of returning to her hometown to help sell oranges for her family, which…
Which are the finest lychee-growing regions in Guangdong? Zhong Ge and Guo Rui, villagers from Yinlin in Conghua, answered in unison: Conghua would undoubtedly rank among the best. They maintain that a lychee’s quality depends not merely on latitude, but also on local microclimates. Conghua’s crop has long been celebrated…
Recently, reports of Henan’s ‘rotting-field rain’ and the frantic rush to harvest wheat have swept across social media, striking a chord with everyone who follows agriculture. The Guanzhong region of Shaanxi, another major wheat-growing area, endured the same downpours almost simultaneously with Henan, and the outlook for its wheat crops…
Earlier this year, four years after moving to the Netherlands, my partner and I finally rented a hectare of land in Utrecht province, and I began working on my farm. Before I decided to set up a farm, I completed placements at several small organic farms in the Netherlands. During…
