Personal stories and production narratives of smallholders, individual farmers, and family farms.
Four eco-farms—Lexiangu, Yuefengdao, Wuyuetian and Fukang Shengliang—span the region from Shanghai to Jiaxing; their losses ranged from minor damage to nearly a whole year’s work down the drain, with scale, infrastructure and farming methods the decisive variables.
In 2006, on the banks of the Jinsha River, six ethnicities in Chezhu village celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival together. Their mooncakes had no filling; the wheat, rapeseed oil, eggs and maltose were all homegrown—”Everything but the iron pot is homegrown.”
Weekly supply at Xiaoliushu Farm, Shunyi, has dropped from 200 boxes to 40; at Kongkonggu Farm, Pinggu, aubergines and tomatoes were nearly all lost. Autumn sowing is delayed by almost a month, and national wholesale prices are up 40%.
Jinzi grows heirloom yellow garden peas using biodynamic farming on mountains above 3,000 metres in Xiaojin County, Aba Prefecture. Shipping lasts only about two weeks a year; this year, three jin of pods finally reached the dining buddies’ table.
Once small workshops for frying pork rind were banned, tofu makers swapped black oil they could skim clean for chemical defoamers—and the caregiver has since refused all soya products. One “people-first” crackdown has severed not just farm livelihoods but trust at the dinner table.
At Meet Farm in Meishan, Chen Ying replaces pesticides and chemical fertilisers with rice-duck pest control and kitchen-waste composting. Across forty mu, she grows and raises everything herself – the only food that needs to be bought in is salt.
At Yinlin Village, Taiping Town, Conghua, Guangzhou, Sister Hu’s 400-plus lychee trees yielded over 8,000 jin last year — this year, not even 100. At Pengcheng Ecological Farm, 200-plus trees produced just a dozen or so lychees. Prices up several times over still cannot recoup the costs.
In Eren Valley, Fujian, Kouzi’s trial-planted onions this spring rotted almost entirely in the field. His carefully prepared winter wheat set not a single grain after daily rain during anthesis. Self-sufficiency dashed – yet he says he’ll still plant.
Hu Xuemei, a Pidu District farmer, went from water-protection volunteer to turning her family’s fields into a diverse, finely tended ecological farm and setting up farming-based arts-education classes with an art teacher. After half a lifetime passively running a household, she became the master of her own life.
Unhappy that the old 32-square-metre house blocked the sun, Grandma Kouzi shrank to fifteen square metres in Wicked Valley, Fujian, from two old granaries. Rocket stove linked to heated kang wards off southern damp-cold; freezer-door skylights let in light and breeze. Eating, drinking, toileting, reading, exercise — all fits.
