Food production, farmers, rural society, and agroecological practices.
Sun Shan runs an ecological farm and fermentation kitchen in Ottawa. Eight years of daily vegetable-growing and sauerkraut-making embody Sandor Katz’s vision in The Art of Fermentation: fermentation is not just food preservation, but a way to rebuild connections with microorganisms, the land and the community.
At Alxa Zhiliangtian Farm, a yellow-painted shipping container coffee house brings together study tour children, fellow volunteers and kitchen helpers. Two months of small, everyday moments gave concrete warmth to the seemingly barren desert.
Typhoon Doksuri tracked north. In Yingchengzi Village, Wuchang, Third Grandpa’s two hectares of river-bend land suffered total crop failure, leaving the whole family sixty or seventy thousand yuan in the red. The insurance payout was long overdue, and end-of-September gales caused further lodging, forcing harvest by hand.
Meteorologist Wei Ke and scholars Liu Juan and Liu Jie point out: rural disaster preparedness falls short amid extreme weather; farmers cut planting due to labour shortages; ambiguous insurance settlements leave smallholders unable to secure compensation; and the left-behind elderly are pushed into ever greater vulnerability.
From two projects to over 400, exceeding 40 GW, China’s decade-plus agrivoltaics boom has been driven by surplus PV manufacturing capacity, not agricultural demand. Most sites see farmland abandonment or low yields under panels; arable land is occupied and farmers receive only land rent.
As the scattered village in the New Territories crumbled under demolition, Sanjiao carried a sourdough starter through pandemic streets and bread workshops, finally reaching Yinlin Ecological Farm, Conghua, where ecological smallholder flour gives bread back to the land beneath her feet and the community around her.
The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the Forest and Farm Facility surveyed over 1,800 smallholder farmers across 13 countries and found that their own climate adaptation spending far exceeds international climate finance. Farmer organisations are calling on COP28 to fund grassroots cooperatives directly.
Two generations of Holzers have rebuilt terrace ponds on the arid slopes of the Central Alps, meeting the harsh climate with 72 interconnected ponds and small year-on-year experiments, grounding ecological diversity in economic calculation rather than moralistic rhetoric.
A farmer who refuses chemical fertiliser and pesticide in a Hakka village — the weeding auntie worked four days, urged me to spray for four, then carried off my taro stalks on her way out. Her own taro? Too full of pesticide to eat.
Fermentation is migrating from home kitchens to factory production lines; millennia-old techniques are on the brink of disappearing. Sandor Katz, author of The Art of Fermentation, advocates bringing fermentation back to homes and communities, rebuilding local food economies and communities. Foodthink hosts four Shared Reading discussions in November.
