Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
Grandma Kouzi at Villain’s Valley in Fujian harvested over a hundred pumpkins and over a hundred jin of beans, grains and peanuts in 2025—full food self-sufficiency except salt. A single batch of air-fryer roasted pumpkin sustains a day’s staple food.
Where farming guarantees a loss and processing a profit, Wuwei’s returned young farmer Yin Fahua makes noodles from purchased gravel-covered Hongguangtou wheat — only to hold the line on pesticide-free ecological farming, and to hold on to that fragrant handful of fried chickpeas along his childhood field edges.
In far-flung Beijing, Uncle Li bought two bunches of winter-keeping leeks at the open-air market twenty-odd years ago. Selecting the best, crossing varieties, treasuring storm survivors—he saves seed; the white stems stretch and thicken. Buyers agree: no one round here growing leeks comes close to old Li.
Zha Shiyire, a Huayao Yi, grew up in a mountain village in Shiping County, Yunnan. Her mother whistled from the bund, calling the wind; the family bent, planting tobacco, reaping rice, shredding radish strips. Farm work is never finished — she never loved it, nor could she loathe it.
In 30 mu of foothill fields, hail wipes out apricots and rain washes away autumn crops. Wenzizi and Changjiaoling learn the craft from old farmers, sow more seeds, and over ten years have gathered two books and a way of living alongside the sky.
Zhen Rui’s 450-mu farm in Miyun, farmed for thirteen years, lost all topsoil to flash floods; resuming cultivation in the short term looks hopeless. He temporarily grafted his operation onto a neighbouring farm, while northern farmers still lack systematic insurance and land-planning support against extreme rainfall.
From harvesting and drying to storing and selling, growers and buyers have exhausted every strategy they can think of—yet nearly every corn grower still has no choice but to accept reduced yields, falling prices and mould. Consecutive years of natural disasters are rapidly rendering the farming experience farmers have built up obsolete.
Drawing on her organic farming experience in Shengou Village, Taiwan, Kouzi spent four years at Erren Valley practising self-sufficiency – grappling with cogon grass, purifying wastewater with banana plants and water lilies – and ultimately confirmed that humans can be a link that nourishes the land.
Fish cages shattered, mud crabs all escaped with the seawater, orchards and sugarcane groves blown flat. Farmers in Hailing Island, Taishan and elsewhere, barely ten-odd days from the Mid-Autumn harvest, were ruined overnight. The salinisation left by seawater inundation is even harder to repair in the short term.
In Villain Valley, Fujian, Grandma Kouzi builds this permaculture system through layered planting, duck-shelter symbiosis and perennial herbaceous crops — plant once, eat for a lifetime, and the primary task of humans is simply to harvest.
