Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
In Èrén Valley, Fujian, Farmer Kouzi has spent four years clearing wild land toward self-sufficiency, turning a gully once deemed unfit for human habitation into fields for growing and admiring. This year, the gardenias behind the house bloomed for the first time.
Foodthink has compiled four firsthand accounts of Guangxi’s floods from Liuzhou, Nandan and Du’an. Amid sudden swings between drought and flooding, flash floods destroyed water systems, ponds lay empty, and White-trousered Yao women braved the downpour to rescue hand-sewn ceremonial outfits — a season’s livelihood faces rebuilding.
Kangli, a Yunnan Yi woman, put herself through school on matsutake and rooted in Chuxiong; Jinpeng returned to the Greater Khingan forest, supporting his family by mountain foraging for over a decade. They discuss wild mountain produce pricing, depopulation of mountain villages, and the real labour under climate change.
Since the 1980s, Taizhou growers have criss-crossed the country growing watermelons. In Yannan Village in southern Jiangsu, twenty households make polytunnels their home, dismantling and rebuilding year after year, running husband-and-wife partnerships across land that demands crop rotation.
This spring, Shaanxi logged its lowest average precipitation for the same period since 1961. Shitouhe Reservoir — the “Water Tower of Guanzhong” — is nearly dry. Mei County fruit growers pay steep wages for migrant workers to race the flowers; wheat fields yellow and wither over vast stretches.
The Udon Thani sugar mill was shut for over-receiving burnt sugarcane, stranding nearly 2,000 lorries and some 50,000 tonnes facing rot. Fresh-cut harvesting costs triple that of burning; fines and subsidies cannot bridge the gap — smallholders have no way out between the burn ban and survival.
Old Li’s 70 mu of ecological farmland in H Province, guarded fifteen years, lies blanketed by mulch film fragments from a groundnut haulm plant 100 metres away. Spring ploughing slipping; two months of appeals yielded only two departments citing the same law yet deflecting responsibility onto each other.
Li Jidong’s 70 mu of farmland in Luanzhou, Hebei, is blanketed in shredded mulch film from a neighbouring feed-processing plant. The agriculture and environment bureaus cite the same regulations yet each insists the pollution is the other’s to tackle. Spring sowing looms, yet he still cannot sow.
In 2011, Yu Jiangang took part in rural development in Zhuang villages in Longzhou, Guangxi. In 2024, he returned to Bangui hamlet to find the water buffalo all but vanished, the village school down to just 5 pupils, and the village still living to its own rhythm.
Late April: the Nanning Urban Farmers’ Market’s eleventh annual gathering at Zhongtuan Village ecological farm, Hengzhou. Traditional farmers, young returnees and volunteers brought their own tents, bowls and chopsticks beneath the banyan tree, huddling through shortfalls of people and money to sustain this urban–rural community of sustainable living.
