Qinguang gave way to Fuji, Fuji was uprooted for grain, grain brought in no money—peaches and plums went in. Dad, close to seventy, tallies next year’s accounts between the wheat rows, and whether they will still sell in a few years, no one can say.
After the straw-burning ban, rice farmers in the Dongting Lake area of Hunan paid an extra 60–80 yuan per mu for straw shredding, rotary tillage and pesticide spraying — yet the rice stem borers overwintering in rice stubble have grown more numerous year on year.
Musang King and Black Thorn oversupply triggered this year’s Malaysian “durian tsunami”. Balik Pulau’s Kampung old-tree smallholders are caught in it: tree-ripened fruit has an extremely short shelf life, sold cheap or discarded first – and many farmers have already felled their old trees, switching to grafted premium cultivars.
A month of hoeing, carrying water, huddling by the fire through downpours to mountain folk songs at Baicao Garden — Sister Yan Ping’s ecological farm, Guigang, Guangxi — metres from a chemical-fertiliser orchard. The body into the land’s rhythm, until April’s heat sent a nature-hungry graduate back to the city.
Autumn 2025: a village in Hunan’s Dongting Lake area enforced the strictest burn ban in history. Village cadres patrolled day and night for three months and spent 400,000 yuan — yet villagers still burned away nearly a thousand mu of straw in the blind spots of tower cameras.
Dutchman Metske began with a vegetarian restaurant in the squatting movement. He farms roughly 6.5 acres of heavy clay in Kent, using wildflower strips to support ecological balance and grow seasonal vegetables – selling at north London’s organic farmers’ market every Saturday.
Xian Zi, a post-2000 graduate student at China Agricultural University’s Science and Technology Backyard in Quzhou, built an organic fertiliser plant with villagers to turn chicken manure that livestock keepers pay to clear back into field fertiliser – but found the barrier not technology, only reality’s “input and output” ledger.
Foodthink screens four films about food and labour back-to-back at Tuanjiehu this June — from food-delivery riders to rice farmers, pastoralists and fermentation artisans. Each screening is followed by an in-person conversation with directors, protagonists and activists, and preceded by a farmers’ market.
Over a decade since the 2016 straw burning ban became a political priority in the three northeastern provinces, Heilongjiang’s Hulan, Bayan and Bin County farmers and cadres proved: ridges wrecked by outsiders, stubble after baling, rice stalks never fully cleared — all for one burning window before spring planting.
Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) built Concentra in Belo Horizonte, pooling market support work — compliance certification, warehousing, logistics — so dispersed smallholder produce can reach market at scale. Not easily transplanted, the experience points to a key path: turning what no individual can shoulder alone into collective capacity.